Samuli Heljo | Updated myself with TOGAF certification

The Blog

Updated myself with TOGAF certification

published November 24, 2010

It is a quite exiting moment when submitting a Prometric test… Today I passed TOGAF™ Foundation certification test after 3 days of hard studying and that makes me now an enterprise architecture guru, right? Well… not quite. But still, these days have been very good and I have learned lot about enterprise architecture and some best practices to implement it.

I am pretty much Agile and Lean proponent and you might be wondering how they will match up with TOGAF. Basically TOGAF introduces an Architecture Development Method, which is a core process defining how work is to be done. It is very much business focused and tries to find a way for a organization to align business with IT. I somewhat feel that it has same fundamental “problem” as ITIL , namely it manages process with document handovers and sometimes it feels that a document is the purpose for doing something. It surely says that bucks are collected at operations phase, but focus is pretty much with different documentation. OK, both frameworks have roots in big organizations and documentation bureaucracy is more justifiable in those.

TOGAF and ITIL both say that they can and should be customized to fit organizational needs. Then they go describing in detail how work should be done. A process that has to be tailored down is challenging for people as we will usually add some parts “just in case we need it”. This is also a problem with RUP implementations and they just tend to grow too big and non-agile. In this light, a method that describes a process with lots of “potential documentation” can almost accidentally be implemented as “heavy documentation”. It is like selecting movie candies from large selection, you will want to check every row and in the end you just have too much.

TOGAF does not give any guides for software development process and it is easy to implement actual TOGAF work package(s) using Scrum or XP. TOGAF even suggests implementing target architecture in “steps” (transition architectures) that fit nicely with Scrum release plan. However, many benefits of Scrum will be lost if we are just “sprinting though fully preplanned project”. Then again, I am not convinced that every project should be done using Scrum (check out Balancing agility and discipline) and in some cases PMBOK or Kanban approach will suite better. Key is to select correct process and forget about process fanaticism. But either way, people are doing the work, so in the end organization culture must be nurtured to produce top-notch results. Huh, sounds easy :)

All in all, I see very much value in combining TOGAF, Scrum, and ITIL while focusing on shortening lead time by eliminating waste from value chain using Lean tools. Next I will dig into Six Sigma, CMMI and COBIT to build a process behemoth that will solve all problems in the world. No, actually before that I will play few rounds of badminton.

Samuli @ 15:53 (No Comments)

tags: ITIL, Lean, Scrum, TOGAF