Does agile work in Olympic Sports?

What happens if we use Olympic sports as example, where you start with the sport when you are young and win an Olympic medal as an adult. Does the agile approach with an MVP work?

It’s rather easy for a child to get a football and start playing. This is a very good example of an MVP. If she have talent and a desire to train, she can play in the championships when she is grown up. Small steps to a gold medal, in an agile way.

If your child want to win a gold medal in sailing, the stakes are a bit higher. The first boat is usually a one person sailing boot that even a child can manage. But the cost for the boat is higher than a football and the kid need additional skills like swimming. Not to forget the need for safe waters and maintenance off season.

If you instead of thinking of buying a horse for your offspring, then you agile approach will fail big. The concept of MVP will not work as the skills to manage a horse when not riding is far more demanding than putting the shoes on a shelf after game. If you don’t have the skills to manage the horse fully, then the health of both the rider and the horse are at stake.

This is why you have to think through the concept of what you need to succeed with a MVP.

A football works fine, a small sailing boot is on the verge of what a young teenager can manage on her own. But to buy a horse to a youngster to ride and to take care of if he or she, or the parents, doesn’t have any prior knowledge about horses is really a bad idea.

If you think that you can succeed with a digital transformation with an MVP, it’s time to re-think. It’s much more complex that taking care of a horse.

Do you need a new target architecture?

As usual my answer would be it depends. To say yes or no to this question I usally look at five different things.

• Changes to your business model

• Changes to your operation model

• From products to services and subscriptions

• Software becomes part of you services

• Regulatory changes

If any of these five business drivers are relevant for you, then you need an updated target architecture on Enterprise level.

Why you needed it? Main benefit is to identify the complexity of the changes when driving a digital transformation.

Question everything?

If you work as a Enterprise Architect, part of your job is to question how things are done today and make analysis of the findings.

But if you question everything, you will get in trouble regardless if your are an employer or contractor.

Don’t try to persuade your company that the world is flat when making a supply chain architecture.

If you question the latest presidential election results in US, the question is more if your analytical skills are tainted or your paid by some one else.

If you think Covid is caused by 5G networks and the vaccine contains microships, your future is probably more in narrative writing then in Enterprise Architecture.

If your client is a firm beliver in conspiracy theories, you don’t have a chance in hell yo make a proper analytic work.

On the other hand, if you question existing vendors and their solutions, this is often part of your job. If you have a new business model, it may be good to evaluate the options. A least to get a better deal from the existing vendor.

A sisyphean profession

Gerben Wierda wrote “Don’t be an Enterprise Architect” on LinkedIn. I understand his thinking as what we do is a sisyfos task.

Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do, but you need both patience and passion to be an Enterprise Architect.

During tweenty years, there has been only a few home runs with client projects.

The biggest challenges is as always the resistance to change in the organisation and different priorities between business units.

Technology is not the problem. With the caveat that you need to understand it to know what is possible, how long time it takes and the cost.

As people in general want to do as they always done, you will not win the popular vote as you question their ways of working. This is why you need a skin thick as an elephant when it comes to critique.

If you instead take the approach to be popular, then your challenge is to get changes done, that are aligned within the company.

-Det ska fan vara teaterdirektör, skrev August Blanche i sin komedi "Ett resande teatersällskap" - 1848.

Dissolve the EA team

To dissolve the EA team, is that a good idea?

Marc Thomas asked on LinkedIn what you would do if you had unlimited resources.

My suggestion was to remove the architecture team but I only gave a partial answer of why.

First of all, the value of Enterprise Architecture is zero if there is no change, thus no need for EA.

Second, if you have unlimited resources, the need from savings using enterprise architecture to govern a transformation is null.

Third, if the organization doesn’t understand the value of architecture and more see the architects as a hurdle, then we can dissolve the EA team.

But, and this is a huge one.

You can’t throw more people and money on problems that comes from complexity. Not even the biggest software companies in the world succeed with that, without a long term architecture thinking.

Not to forget the pipe dream of unlimited resources in a world where most companies struggles with margins below 10%.

The bottom line is if your EA team doesn’t provide any value to the organization, then you should dissolve it. But don’t expect your problems to vanish in the air.