The architecture flywheel: The beating heart of your enterprise architecture
You've seen the map, and you understand key success factors for transforming your enterprise architecture. Now you need to understand how things move.
Static frameworks only get you so far. The real power comes from understanding the rhythm – the continuous flywheel that keeps your architecture evolving. Strategy informs delivery, delivery informs strategy.
This mirrors product management's discovery-delivery loop, but with one critical difference: for enterprise architecture, two interconnected loops run simultaneously at different altitudes.
By understanding this last foundational piece, you will see clearly how roles, practices and routines are fundamental to keeping the flywheel moving, and your architecture in a perpetual state of evolution. Let's step through it.
Strategy & Planning: Actionable vision
Aligned to the Strategy altitude in the ea placemat map, the Strategy and Planning loop provides constant "big picture" evolution:
VISIONING
- Motivational Forces: Externally or internally sourced reasons driving a desired change or shift in what we are doing.
- Goals: Informed by the forces, organizational goals provide clarity for the outcomes we want to achieve.
- Courses of Action: Potential options for achieving the goals.
ASSESSING
- Discovery Assessments: Evaluation of the options for viability, scope of impact, and readiness.
- Initiative Prioritization: The filter that ensures we aren't trying to do too much at the same time.
PLANNING
- Strategic Architecture: A holistic vision for what is needed to support an initiative and achieve the desired outcomes to meet the goals.
- Runway/Plan: A phased approach to step towards the vision.
This loop ensures you establish shared vision before teams start building – so everyone knows where they're heading and why.
Delivery: The value engine
Where the rubber hits the road, the Delivery loop (aligned to the Delivery altitude) makes our dreams a reality.
ACTIVATING
- Demand: Things we'd like done – self-identified by teams or sourced from enterprise needs (i.e., the Strategy and Planning loop).
- Roadmap: The intended focal areas over a longer time horizon.
- Resource Alignment: Adjustments to teams and their allocated resources (including people and funding).
SOLUTIONING
- Backlog: Specific work in support of the roadmap translated to actionable delivery requests.
- Design: Solution architecture between or within a team's owned systems.
- Deployed Solutions: Delivered systems providing value in real life.
OBSERVING
- Report & Retrospect: Reporting of progress against roadmaps, runways and plans, and learning from experience.
The delivery engine ensures we have the right people, at the right place, at the right time, delivering the right outcomes.
Feedback flows continuously back to Strategy and Planning informing progress and enabling pivots or adjustments to the strategy or plan.
Lubricating Functions: Keep the gears from grinding
The two loops only work together efficiently when something reduces the friction between them. That's where Lubricating Functions come in – what keeps the system from seizing up, ensuring strategy actually translates to delivery, and delivery insights actually improve strategy.
LUBRICATING FUNCTIONS
Integration & Flow: The mid altitude that connects Strategy and Delivery, enabling flow between both loops.
Platforms & Tools: Enable solutions that make it easy to do the right thing aligned to the Strategy.
Change Management, Insights & Governance: Marketing, training, and tracking progress against the Strategy and Goals.
These are the extended teams that make strategy accessible and actionable – the same teams we discussed in Success Factors that prevent EA from becoming an ivory tower.
The architecture flywheel, our ea placemat in motion
| ea "at rest" | ea "in motion" |
|---|---|
 |
 |
These two views of your enterprise architecture – at rest and in motion – will orient you throughout everything that follows.
In the next post, we begin the Discovery series where we will step into the Visioning and Assessing parts of the flywheel to triage your current state architecture.
Reflection
Before you move on, pause for a moment:
Where is your flywheel spinning fastest? Where is it grinding?
Do Strategy & Planning and Delivery actually inform each other in your organization, or are they disconnected?
Which Lubricating Functions are missing or weak in your context?
References
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