New – EA training-course
Yep, I’ve finally Got Round To It: I’ve created a full set of materials for an EA training-course, building on the whole-of-enterprise approach that I’ve championed all of these years. (Whole-of-enterprise, that is, in contrast to the arbitrarily-constrained IT-is-the-centre-of-everything approach that almost everyone else still seems to promote…)
It’s based on the Five Elements structure that I’ve used in many places in my work, such as – in the diagram below – the relationships between strategy, tactics and operations:
In practice, it’s split into six sessions:
- Introduction – why enterprise-architecture, architecture and design, architecture and services, architecture as story, core framework (Five Elements)
- Part 1: Purpose – overall business-context, stakeholders, unifying story, vision and values
- Part 2: People – people in enterprise-architecture, stakeholder-engagement, viewpoints, skills, power and responsibility, politics of enterprise-architecture
- Part 3: Preparation – governance, tools and frameworks, trade-offs and uncertainties, everything-as-a-service, design for uncertainty (backbone and edge), viable services, service-context, architecting for change
- Part 4: Process – complexity, tame-problems and wicked-problems, innovation and invention, sensemaking and decision-making, role and development of checklists
- Part 5: Performance – meaningful metrics and benefits-realisation, continuous-improvement and the learning organisation
There are ‘practicals’ – breaks for practice and experimentation – throughout each of those sessions. I also recommend that each participant (or group of participants) bring with them a real-world challenge that they want to work on during the course.
(This is an intentionally-generic framework, appropriate for any type of architecture. That’s why I haven’t yet mentioned business-models or reference-architectures or application-architectures or the like: to me, those are all instances of architectures, examples of what we might choose to work during the course, rather than explicit or mandatory ‘content’ to apply in every architecture. That’s an important distinction, actually…)
It can be run as:
- half-day (not recommended, because it gives almost no time for practicals – but some people would need to do it that way)
- one-day (minimum recommended – gives useful time for practicals plus some application on participants’ worked-examples)
- two-day (recommended – gives more time for in-depth practicals, plus equivalent of whole day on worked-examples)
The Introduction session is also short enough, and visual enough, for use as a standalone ‘introduction to enterprise-architecture’, for time-starved executives and suchlike.
Pricing would vary dependent on travel-costs, number of participants (for training-materials and reference-sets), commercial versus not-for-profit and other factors – but would be comparable to other courses of this type.
Given my various rants about certification and the frequent evils thereof, the only ‘certification’ offered will be a pretty certificate to say that a participant has done the course. If anyone needs one, that is. 🙂
More details on the Tetradian website, eventually. For now, if you’re interested in doing this, or perhaps organising one for a company or as an open-to-the-public event, please let me know?
Many thanks to all, anyways.
Well done.
It will be interesting to know how many sign up for your Whole-of-Enterprise Architecture courses. Is WoEA a good acronym I wonder? … 🙂
Oh ye of little faith! 🙂 (and much experience? 🙁 🙂 )
But the acronym isn’t ‘WoEA’, of course – it’s just ‘EA’, ‘enterprise-architecture’. If other course-providers want to confuse people by teaching only a tiny subset of EA, and then make out that that tiny subset ‘is’ the whole of ‘the architecture of the enterprise’, that’s their problem, not mine. My job is to help people sort out the resultant mess, that’s all. 🙂
Great stuff Tom. I’d love to get you over here but don’t get your hopes up (yet).
The real question is of course how “pretty” the certificate will be. (excuse the levity)
Thanks, Stuart – and yes, will find a suitable certificate-design full of all sorts of twisty curlicues and engravery-bits, just for you! 🙂
(And then ruin it with my atrocious handwriting, of course… 🙁 🙂 )
No “tweet this” button? :{
I tweet this direct. 🙂
Workin’ on it, Bob… Have just done a search of the WordPress.org list, but turns out to be surprisingly hard to find something that a) actually works, b) doesn’t clutter the space, and c) doesn’t end up feeding into someone else’s data-store… Will keep looking…
Great summary, Tom!
You even created the executive summary that we can distribute! 🙂 Thank you for that as well!
/Emeric
Thanks, Emeric – will keep in touch on that (as you know).
Let me know when you’re running one I Sydney Tom or simpler, how many do you need to sign up to a 2-day course to come over and run one? I’ll email you to follow this up. 🙂
Many thanks for the follow-up on that, Alex – will likewise keep in touch on that, and publish here when we have anything that’s more concrete re dates/venues etc.
As a ball-park, for most venues, we’d probably need a minimum of 5 people to make it viable – not just from a cost-perspective, but also to get enough interaction going. And probably a maximum of about 15-20 at a time, to support the best levels and types of interaction between all the participants (if there are too many people, the quality starts to go down).
Very interesting set Mr. Graves. The flow and content will get to non IT people and IT people alike. Lots of refreshments and good food between sections to ensure everyone has lots of chat time about what they have learned.
Thanks for that, Peter (reviewing the course-content).
Strongly agree re “lots of refreshments and good food between sections” etc – those are really important to help the interaction along, and hence the embedding of the learning.
Hi Tom,
Good to see an alternative product and approach out there alongside what have become the “standard” EA training products.
Let me know if you are looking for collaborators for getting it to market.
Cheers,
Tony
Many thanks, Tony – have replied separately via email on that.