Standing-up a Modern Architecture Review Board

Standing-up a Modern Architecture Review Board

Look at the picture above.

• Direction
• Planning
• Execution

Your Architecture Review Process needs to support Stakeholders providing direction, Sponsors planning, and Implementer executing.

When standing up your architecture review board ensure it meets the five goals of an architecture review board.

It needs to have dynamic delegated decision making with serious oversight. It needs to deliver architecture governance.

The change energy to develop a modern Architecture Review Board is considerable.

You need to move decision authority where it belongs. You need to find a way to make architecture decision making dynamic within the authority of your architecture review board.

This means taking questions and getting decisions at the right level. You will require architecture to support strategy and portfolio . Direction means architecture roadmaps, architecture principles, and architecture patterns.

This means bring together the right decision makers. We use SABSA's domain model. A SABSA domain gives you:

• Clear accountability and responsibility
• Consistent performance expectations, constraints, and risk appetite
• Dynamic reporting against performance targets and risk appetite

This means providing effective direction to your implementation teams. It does not matter of they are traditional projects  managed in a clear program, or digital products delivered by agile teams in a product portfolio.

You need to be able to tell them:

• what they are expected to deliver and how success is measured
• what constraints to their decision making exist
• what the risk appetite is

In other words, you need to deliver an architecture's work packages, principles, patterns, standards, and reference architectures. It might be packaged as a digital product definition, platform architecture, integration standards and data protection standards.

Throughout the stand-up you will be faced with constant chicken & egg questions. How can you guide a project without the bigger questions being answered. The answer is just enough architecture and heavy reliance on strategy, principles and patterns. The more complicated answer is actively managing risk.

You will bring meaningful questions and advice to the right people at the right time.

Last, you need to guard your dynamic modern architecture review board. Many people look for simple centralized decision making. Others will assume the decisions, and information, are technical and require a technical decision makers. Nothing can be further from the truth in a digital enterprise. You business leaders can Information about change, expected value, anticipated cost and risk needs to be presented. We always tie directly value to the organization’s objectives and current circumstances.

Starting is daunting. It will be hard work. It will require fitting into other organizational processes. You will need considerable change energy. Every day you wait, you are not guiding effective change. As always, if you need help to implement an architecture review board, please contact us.

Adopting an Architecture Review Board

Adopting an Architecture Review Board needs you your enterprise architecture team to inject itself into decision making and project processes.

There is self-help guidance in the TOGAF Standard. Modern Architecture Review Boards are described in the Practitioners’ Guide to Enterprise Architecture, and the Governance Guide.

As an immediate start, shut down any traditional IT-centric decision making. Then educate your enterprise architects about decision making and enterprise architecture governance.