I study chess and learn move sequences for Openings, Middle Game, Endings, etc and witness many people get caught up in debates around move sequences. There seem to be endless debates which opening is the best defense for specific offense openings. For example, the debate “is the Sicilian Defense the best defense against Giuoco Piano” seems to never end. As I grow my skills, I’m learning to appreciate chess concepts more and try to unlearn habits built from years of performing the same sequences over and over again. In a sense, I’m maturing my chess skills by being knowledgeable on the various move sequences and more importantly focus on learning chess concepts and adapting them to different scenarios. This isn’t surprising as it is commonly understood that chess grandmasters tend to focus more on concepts such as Control the Center, Combinations, and Accumulate Small Advantages, and apply those concepts to given situations. In fact, the famed Bobby Fischer reminds us that sticking to a regimented approach to chess sequences will often lose to a creative mind who assumes no specific technique, but applies chess concepts to any situation.

My professional career began as a software programmer and I noticed, and sometimes participated in, debates related to why one programming language was better than another. Over time I learned that I could write higher quality code when I focused on mastering patterns (eg Gang of Four Design Patterns) and their application to different scenarios as opposed to focusing on mastering the semantics of a particular language.

I’ve recently begun to study martial arts and guess what, same situation. There are so many martial art systems out there and, you guessed it, tons of debate as to which is superior to another. When I was a kid, I loved watching Kung Fu Theatre on Saturday mornings. I loved to see Praying Mantis style fight Iron Fist, then Tiger’s Claw take on Drunken Master. I always thought that was just for fun and never thought that adults actually behave like that in the real world. As it turns out, they do. In fact, such debates have gone on for centuries and still go on to today; “Karate is superior to Kung Fu” or “Grappling is superior to Boxing”, and so on. Most of martial arts masters rely on mastering concepts and applying them to their martial art system. For example, Grapplers such as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu emphasize concepts like Maintain Low Center of Gravity and Spine Control, and apply them in movements to submit their opponent given ground fighting situations.

It seems that masters of a domain tend to master theory and explore how to apply it to different situations. In other words, the skills of a master are focused on concepts and build their ability by learning to apply the concepts to different situations. Interestingly, in the domain of martial arts, there is one that stands out to the rest; Wing Chun. Wing Chun is primarily a concept-based martial art that focuses on concepts such as Control the Centerline, Use Leverage to Divert Power, Body Alignment for Strength, Relax to Develop Power, Sense Your Opponents Motions, Speed vs Power vs Complexity Tradeoff, etc. At its core, Wing Chun is a collection of martial art concepts that can apply to any martial art system and we’re seeing this happen today. Through the popularity of mixed martial arts, most of the martial artists take concepts from various systems and apply them to maximize their strengths in a given situation. Today, most of the popular mixed martial art systems have adopted Wing Chun concepts to some degree.

Strategic Planning Concepts.

In the domain of strategic planning, there are many methodologies, and yes, the debates for which is superior go on and on. There’s the balanced scorecard variations (eg 9-step process by the Balanced Scorecard Institute and The Palladium Group’s The Palladium Execution Premium Model), McKinsey’s Strategy Framework, Hoshin Kanri, Blue Ocean, Value Chain Analysis, and many, many more.

Disclaimer: I know, some of you will notice that I’m grouping lots of different methodologies into the same bucket “strategic planning” that you may disagree with. For the purposes of this article, however, it doesn’t matter. The assumption is that these are all related to strategic planning in some form and because the purpose of this article is not to compare these methods but rather extrapolate the concepts they demonstrate, it's okay to consider any method related to strategic planning for this exercise.

So, to the point of this post, I wonder if we could consider mastering strategic planning by avoiding the "such and such method is superior" debate and instead identify important strategic planning concepts and master applying them in different situations; organizational structures, differences in leadership culture, competitive markets, industries, etc. To help get the juices flowing, here is a set of important strategic planning concepts I’ve formed based on my experience:

I think it’s time to “master” strategic planning by refining a set of strategic planning concepts like those above and then spend our time exploring how to apply them to organizations given their specific dynamic situations.

By the way, 5 points if you can name the people in the images used in this article. :)

Also interesting was this statement "This survey highlights the fact that when a company embarks on an inspiring mission, it’s employees become inspired by their work and that makes for an inspiring customer experience every time.” I hadn't thought of 'inspiration' as a strategy, or strategic theme for the strategic planning experts out there. Hm, fascinating.

 America's Top 25 Most Inspiring Companies:

1. Microsoft
2. Disney
3. Walmart
4. Chick-fil-A
5. Target
6. McDonald’s
7. Google
8. Amazon
9. Johnson & Johnson
10. Toms Shoes

Here's a link to the Forbes article announcing their findings: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/10/01/americas-most-inspiring-companies-2013/

Btw, I want to note that I don't assume there is a requirement for such roles in organizations. In fact, I think the perfect situation is where these roles don't exist at all and instead they simply become a discipline adopted by roles such as Organization Leader, Business Managers and Portfolio Planners. This helps simplify the link between strategy management skills and the roles accountable in an organization to formulate strategy and manage execution to it. For the moment, however, many organizations need such roles as described below to establish strategy management and execution and mature their organizations to the point it is self-sustaining without them.

One more interesting observation I want to share is that my base template below seems to be a starting point for roles such as Business Architect, Business Performance Manager, Business Strategy Manager, Business Planner, even Enterprise Architect to some groups I've worked with. This indicates to me that these roles are similar, perhaps merging, into a common skill set. Hmmmm.

Job Description Base Template

The <Business Architect/Business Strategy Manager/Business Planner> is responsible for:

• Facilitating Strategy Formulation processes involving market analysis, government regulation, and internal assessment resulting in actionable change plans managed through Portfolio Management processes.
• Facilitating Business Model blueprints optimizing the organization's products/services portfolio in context of the strategy of the organization
• Facilitating Portfolio Management processes across the organization to prioritize resources to deliver the greatest contribution to business strategic objectives, the fastest, and at the lowest cost
• Building strong, working relationships with senior leaders in organizations to ensure organizational alignment and coordination to enable value stream execution
• Continuously manage process quality and data quality with compliance to internal standards and policies
• Building strong, working relationships with People Managers and Budget Planners to align business performance management methods directly to people commitments as well financial allocation classifications
• Championing the purpose and business value realized from the strategy and planning function to stakeholders to gain buy-in and maintain longevity of the function
• Contributing to future state architectures by providing documented business strategies mapped to process models and strategic initiatives

 The successful candidate will have:

• Bachelor’s degree
• 5+ years demonstrated success institutionalizing strategy management processes for large organizations with working knowledge of industry methods such as the Balanced Scorecard, Blue Ocean, SWOT, PESTEL, and the Balanced Scorecard.
• 4+ years demonstrated success institutionalizing business modeling and business process modeling disciplines with a working knowledge of industry methods such as Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas or Environment-Strategy-Structure-Operations
• 4+ years demonstrated success institutionalizing cross-organization Program Portfolio Managements functions for large organizations
• 3+ years demonstrated success implementing Business Process Modeling methods to capture and manage an organization's business processes with a focus on achieving the business' strategy through customer-oriented value chains
• 3+ years demonstrated success implementing change management processes with knowledge of industry best practices such as Kotter’s 8-Step Process for leading change or ADKAR’s change management model
• Experience, training or certification in Enterprise Architecture frameworks and methods such as TOGAF, Zachman Framework, Gartner, et al
• Experience and knowledge for basic financial accounting methods used in budget and planning processes
• Excellent cross-group collaboration and communication skills and demonstrated virtual team leadership skills

 Preferred Qualifications:

• Masters of Business Administration
• Balanced Scorecard Professional
• Strategy Management Professional
• Portfolio Management Professional experience, training or certifications
• Enterprise Architecture experience, training or certifications
• Financial accounting experience, training or certification

Top Business Performance Management Lessons Learned

1. Be clear on what business strategy is. Often people roll their eyes when they hear “alignment to strategy” because the use of strategy in their experience is vague and mysterious. Make strategy specific, meaningful and measurable. As a reminder, business strategy is a clear set of business objectives and a plan to achieve them. Of course, a good strategy involves market analysis and internal trend analysis where the use of popular strategy formulation methods like Michael Porter’s 5-Forces, SWOT, Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard, and
PESTEL are used. At the end of the day, however you get there, the resulting business strategy includes a set of business objectives and an action plan to achieve them.

Business strategy is company-wide and not just limited to “the business” and includes all expressions of business value for investments. Don’t fall into the trap assuming that only the business can have a strategy - all groups within a company can directly contribute to business strategy and, therefore, assert their own business strategy, ideally, explicitly connected to the company’s product/service organization’s strategy.

By the way, because support organization leaders sometimes struggle to understand how they directly support business strategy, I’ve formed The Big 8 Business Objectives to help them recognize the many dimensions of business strategy so they can directly relate and prioritize their organization’s contribution. 

Business strategy is used to calculate business value realized from all types of work efforts. Because business strategy is founded on defining business objectives and scoping investments (aka teams, groups, programs, projects, initiatives, work efforts) to achieve them, the amount of business objective achievement for an investment equates to business value realized from the investment. By the way, avoid falling into the trap of forcing concepts like ROI, NPV, hard and soft benefits, etc. These are dated, legacy terms that are not wrong, but limited in scope that often force programs to perform faulty mathematics to arrive at a monetary expression of business value leading to a loss of direct accountability of strategy contribution. Properly written business objectives (see The Big 8 for examples) cover all expressions of business value for investments. 

2. Business performance management is a tool for empowering a planning culture. BPM is intended to empower groups up and down, left and right to regularly make decisions that are intrinsically prioritized on contributing to the business’ performance. If organizational cultures avoid declaring their business objectives through fear of accountability, or feel it is unnatural to share their business objectives, then the BPM effort is likely to fail. The popular BPM methods out there are founded on federating program portfolio decisions that ripple across organizations to communicate business changes or execution changes so all affected organizations can adjust accordingly. So, in cultures that aren’t comfortable regularly sharing business objectives or program execution health, BPM methods aren’t going to help. 

3. Focus on the intersection. BPM is simply the intersection of four dimensions; Business Strategy, Budget, People and Program Portfolio. It’s important not to extend too deep in any of these dimensions and losing your primary purpose; align the organization to business strategy. The trick is balancing these four perspectives on a simple model scoped by the intersection of the four dimensions and provide valuable views to each of the key BPM stakeholders representing the four dimensions. Remember, keep the model and implementation tight and focused on supporting key BPM stakeholders. The BPM model should provide views such as;

• Business leaders who need to manage business strategic objectives
• Portfolio managers who need to monitor program portfolio health to execute business strategy
• Team members involved in executing programs in the portfolio
• Finance folks who need to monitor the business value realized from the program expenditures.

When you notice the data model is morphing to include specific data points that only folks in a specific domain are interested and don’t fit within the stakeholder concerns noted above, stop and rethink to make sure you are not over-engineering your BPM implementation. The model intersecting the above dimensions is complicated enough. 

4. Make it fun! Business performance management must breach the veneer of a boring, corporate overhead activity. Folks need to make an effort to input data and use the data per the BPM process so ideas to incent them is important and concepts from gamification are your friend. For example, I’ve used simple team competitions as form of gamification to incent folks to enter their data and ensure their data is high-quality, then to incent folks to use the data to win prizes and gain recognition for deciding to fund programs that bring the greatest business value, the fastest, and at the lowest cost. I know this may sound like a silly approach, but it’s actually quite powerful. 

5. Attach to budgeting process. Although “budget” is only one dimension within my BPM model (see above), folks will go the extra mile to identify business objectives to fund their efforts making BPM a powerful lever to gain adoption.

6. Align to the value chain. Most organizations assume a top-down approach to cascade strategy where child organizations inherit their parent organization’s strategy. This approach can lead to The Planning Paradox situation and incent organizations to be self-sustaining silos. Remember to put each group into the context of the Value Streams it supports and look left and right to ensure that the group is tailoring its strategy and planning process to support downstream organizations and providing upstream groups information to help them align.

7. Gain Leader sponsorship and get as close to the products/services teams as possible. BPM methods are difficult to land. BPM efforts led by support organizations tend to ebb and flow their adoption over the years, where situations are far more stable when product/services lead and downstream support organizations adopt accordingly. I know, this is an obvious point but because it is also the most common pitfall, I have to include it. Simply put, get leadership buy-in, preferably leaders in product/services organizations, before asking teams to do work regardless if the value proposition is clear to the actual doers in the organization. Most folks simply won’t do the work even if they think it is the right thing to do. With business group leadership support, they’re more likely to do the work and with the rigor of consistency where it matters most.

 The Big 8

For context when to use The Big 8, below is a simple strategy formulation process. I normally use The Big 8 when defining business objectives after analyzing the market and before defining KPIs.

Why use The Big 8?

Often organization leaders are focused on their internal responsibilities or maybe the company’s trendy, top-of-mind priorities and putting at risk the articulation of a comprehensive set of business objectives useful to organizations upstream or downstream to them. To avoid unintentionally ignoring critical business objectives, I use The Big 8 as a simple checklist to make sure the resulting set of business objectives covers all business concerns. I’m not suggesting every organization include a business objective for each of The Big 8. I’m only suggesting to use The Big 8 as a discussion topic to make sure that an appropriate business objective for that group isn’t over looked.

How should you use The Big 8?

Here are a few tips how to use The Big 8:

• Tip #1. Business Objectives are a leadership tool so don’t simply reuse The Big 8 business objectives word for word. Think of them as generic abstractions ensuring that you’ve covered the most important types of business objectives for any business. Write down business objectives that are meaningful and directly relevant to the organization. For example, “Increase Revenue” is very generic and doesn’t inspire people, however, “Grow Profits in Emerging Markets” may be more relevant and specific to a business.
• Tip #2. Avoid including “projects” or “tools” as Business Objectives
• Bad business objective: “Implement CRM System”
• Good business objective: “Strengthen customer loyalty and retention”
• Tip #3. Business Objectives should be inspirational
• Business Objectives inspire people, so be bold!
• Tip #4. Business Objectives should resonate with your stakeholders
• Business Objectives are a mechanism to show you care about your stakeholders and that you recognize their success is your success. Write an objective that says volumes for your accountability to enable your stakeholder’s success.
• Tip #5. Business Objectives should resonate with your team
• Business Objectives empower your team by providing focus to their purpose and what success looks like given their capacity.

Enter the Business Performance Management (BPM) process. BPM is a process designed to bring alignment across all organizations in a company, regardless of size, in terms of business strategy and project portfolios. For this reason, I believe BPM is one of the most important processes out there for folks interested in achieving ‘alignment’. Interestingly, I come across many people unfamiliar with Business Performance Management so I thought I’d take the opportunity to provide an overview of BPM and help bridge some gaps.

Let’s start with a definition. Wikipedia’s current definition is a good place to start (see here); “Business performance management is a set of management and analytic processes that enable the management of an organization's performance to achieve one or more pre-selected goals. Business performance management has three main activities:

• selection of goals
• consolidation of measurement information relevant to an organization’s progress against these goals, and
• interventions made by managers in light of this information with a view to improving future performance against these goals.

… balanced scorecard is often used as the basis for business performance management activity with organizations.”

To execute a world-class implementation of BPM that resonates with business organizations and support organizations, that isn’t too complex, that can directly manage project portfolios, and resonates with people, we need to be a bit more specific. Here’s a diagram I’ve used to describe BPM in a bit more detail.

The key takeaway message of my diagram above is that BPM is a synchronization mechanism between business strategies and portfolios across a company. BPM processes deliberately ensure the business strategy reflects what business success looks like and is responsive to market forces and internal forces (by the way, “forces” refers to concepts from PESTEL and Michael Porter’s 5-forces model.) BPM processes also ensure project portfolios are responsive to business strategy changes as well as are optimizing portfolio delivery health.

It’s no coincidence that Business Strategy Management and Portfolio Management processes directly relate to BPM. Business Strategy relies on execution through projects because projects equate to strategy execution. Portfolio Management require objectives to be reached, hence the need to tie project achievement to business objectives. BPM ties these two together.

Now, imagine having implemented BPM processes in your organization, the perfect planning meeting staffed by the organization’s leadership might have the following agenda:

1. Review Business Performance. The chair of the meeting would pull up their handy-dandy organizational scorecard and review any changes in their scorecard as a result of market changes or changes in measures of success for their internal stakeholders. Then, manage-by-exception by reviewing any missed targets. The results of this review would result in adding line items to the meeting’s Action Plan normally related to updating business objectives or KPI Targets and/or shifting project scope to ensure execution adopts these changes.
2. Review Portfolio Performance. The chair of the meeting would then pull up their project portfolio health report to take note of any in-flight projects that have missed their targets in terms of on-time projections, on-budget projections, delivery quality, or risk. The discussion would also include a scan of any downstream dependency projects that have failed and impact their project’s ability to deliver. And finally, the meeting attendees would discuss any budget loss or favorability changes to drive a conversation of what to cut or fund as a result. The results of this review would be adding line items to the meeting’s Action Plan related to changes in the project portfolio.
3. Process New Demand. To ensure continuous improvement, the last agenda item of the meeting would be to process new project proposals that promise to deliver greater business value, faster and at a lower cost than the current funded projects. The chair of the meeting would review new business cases per their demand management process and if any new project proposal is approved, the portfolio is reshuffled and the Action Plan is updated.

Here’s a diagram I’ve used to describe such a planning meeting.

The outcome of such a meeting is an up-to-date business strategy connected to all relevant support organizations with optimized project portfolios to achieve it. That’s business performance management.

Greg: “Hey Gabriel, say to me ‘what’s the most important thing about humor?’”

Gabriel: “Okay Greg, what’s the mo-“

Greg: “Timing.”

[At this point, you’re supposed to laugh]

“Timing” is the most important thing to business strategy planning

As it turns out, timing is also the most important thing to support business performance management in terms of managing scorecards and synchronizing them with their project portfolios across a company.

Organizational Hierarchy Strategy Alignment. Organizational Hierarchy Strategy Alignment is the linkage between organization’s scorecards and budgets based on an organization’s hierarchy. The head of an organization’s scorecard and budget links to its children’s organizational scorecards and budgets forming a pyramid-like structure of strategy alignment like the illustration below.

Value Stream Strategy Alignment. From a business strategy perspective, there are two types of organizations in a company; Business Organizations and Support Organizations. A Business Organization is an organization that is responsible for a product with scorecard KPIs related to market share, revenue and customer satisfaction.. All other organizations in a company are Support Organizations with scorecard KPIs related to cost, productivity, quality and risk. Business Strategy is set by the Business Organizations and Support Organizations mobilize to enable them, ideally in a sequential flow based on the Product’s value stream (aka core value stream, value chain and operating model). That is, organizations that deliver a product define their scorecards to express what success look like normally using KPIs like “units delivered”, “revenue received”, “customer satisfaction”. Then, working back up the value stream, Support Organizations determine how to sell the product to hit the desired success targets set by the deliver organization. Then, Support Organizations that market the product define KPIs on their scorecards to express what success looks like to hit the sale’s organization’s KPI Targets. Of course, not all processes are directly involved in the core value stream. Support Organizations that support customers, invoice/bill customers, hire people, manage partners, etc all have an enabling/support role and should work back from the core value stream process to determine what their success looks like based on the organization’s processes that they support. Here’s an illustration of a business strategy cascaded via value streams.

The Planning Paradox

More common than you think, organization’s use a planning schedule to arrive at organizational scorecards and budgets that starts at the top of an organizational hierarchy and flows down from there. The problem is that organizations are rarely organized by value streams. In situations where the Business Organization is a sibling organization to Support Organizations, they both have to produce their scorecards and budgets at the same time forcing Support Organizations to scramble to discover the Business Organization’s strategy to then set their own scorecard for success and the budget necessary to achieve it. Even further, there are times when Business Organization functions report to Support Organizations forcing the Support Organization scorecards and budgets to be set before the Business Organization can declare what they need to be successful. In my experience, this situation causes several intense activities in brief stints that ultimately result in a undocumented alignment of business strategy leaving open the possibility of gaps, overlaps and conflicts in plans to execute the business’ strategy.

To add to the problem, it’s also worth mentioning these challenges posed when business strategy is poorly aligned:

• Lack of ability to perform impact analysis to make upstream groups aware of dependent projects slipping/failing to set expectations
• 60% of Organizations don’t map Organizational Scorecard KPIs to funded projects *
• 66% of HR and IT organizations have no link to the business strategy *
• 70% of middle manager’s and 90% front-line employee’s compensation not linked to the business’ strategy *
• 95% of employees in most organizations do not understand their business’ strategy *

* Harvard Business School, 2006, “The Office of Strategy Management”, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5269.html

Anyway, a few years ago, I shifted professions into a Business Architect role and have learned tons. I now know enough through learning from business management experts and through my own practical experience that I feel comfortable helping others in the area of Business Architecture. I’ve even begun to accept a few mentees and am using the Business Architect Skills Assessment to shape their learning roadmap. The feedback is very positive so I thought I’d share it on my blog. Keep in mind that it is only a start that needs maturing. I’ll try to keep it current with my personal copy as time goes on.

I hope the Business Architect Skills Assessment proves useful to you too: Gabriel’s Business Architect Skills Assessment workbook

I've played various portfolio management roles here in Microsoft ranging from portfolio management to project delivery in Business organizations and Business Support organizations. The roles I’ve performed are Portfolio Manager, Business Architect, Enterprise Solution Architect, Solution Architect, Program Manager, and Project Manager. Each of these roles have responsibilities to encourage/reward failure early in the lifecycle of any project. The assumption I have for rewarding failure is to encourage canceling in-flight projects that won’t deliver the intended business value and save the organization time and money to re-invest in projects that deliver greater business value. Here’s how I’ve done it:

• As a Portfolio Manager: Every portfolio has project failures. The trick is to find them and kill them early. I only measure failure if a project team failed to meet defined KPI Targets once they have passed a Baseline milestone. The assumption here is that post a Baseline milestone, the project’s Steering Committee and project team have accepted all risks and committed to moving forward to deliver a solution to the defined project KPI Targets normally captured in the project charter. I celebrate project cancellations by communicating to the team and to the steering committee via a 'thank you' note describing how the team made one of the most difficult decisions possible and for all the right reasons. I usually tailor an email describing how the cancelation saved the organization time and money by not moving forward with a solution that wouldn't deliver to use the maximum business value and that we can now re-focus our efforts on a more ‘strategic’ solution opportunity. By the way, ‘strategy’ refers the project charter’s defined KPI Targets that directly associate to a Business Organizations or Business Support Organization managed by business performance management processes. See here for details. Another important point in this role is constantly prioritizing the project portfolio based on business strategy (ie prioritized business objectives) and canceling projects that now fall below another project investment that delivers greater business value within a given budget. So, even in the situation where an in-flight project that is on-time, on-budget and poised to hit all critical business requirements but won’t deliver more business value than another un-resourced project, its time to serious consider divesting in the in-flight project and routing those resources to the higher priority project. Of course, don’t do this without careful thought to the people dynamic; most folks may not want to shift focus to a business domain they don’t have expertise on, people have an innate need to finish what they start to feel and achieve the sense of accomplishment, and constant change can begin to frustrate project teams.NOTE: In the situation of a Business Support organization’s project portfolio, frequent redirection of resources can lead to chaos quickly due to the bullwhip effect. To avoid this, the project portfolio must be integrated into business performance management processes directly connected to the Business Organization’s business strategy.
• As a Program Manager and Project Manager. Implement Agile concepts into the project delivery lifecycle. This allows teams to plan early, plat often, and conversely fail early by recognizing signals of failure then course-correcting. As a Program Manager and Project Manager, I frequently step back and assess progress toward our defined objectives in our charter. When progress isn’t being made fast enough in terms due to over-budget, slippage or simply not meeting the critical business requirements, it’s time to re-plan the project that sometimes results in canceling the project altogether. When this happens, I like to take the team out for a celebratory event (dinner, drinks, whatever) for successfully making the decision to cancel a project that was doomed to fail.
• As a Solution Architect. Do the background analysis to help justify why cancelling a project early or retiring a failed solution helps the business in terms of describing how the solution simply won’t meet the business requirements and targeted system quality targets. This can happen via causes such as; technology non-fit, poor software design, misalignment to the Enterprise Solution Architecture, or highly complex business requirements. This analysis normally feeds into the Project Manager or Program Manager project team roles. Anyway, help the team celebrate making the right decision to cancel or retire solutions based on the analysis.
• As a Enterprise Solution Architect. Do the background analysis to help justify to the project Solution Architect why cancelling a project early or retiring a failed solution helps the business in terms of describing how the solution is not aligned to business strategy in regards to misalignment to Architecture Principles and Standards (think application integration patterns, information mastering policy, vendor product policies, etc) that are founded on business strategy expressed in Principle Justifications. One important piece of advice when playing the Enterprise Solution Architect role in this situation, participate in the failure as a project team member. Do not take an “outsiders position”. That leads to ivory tower syndrome and distrust. The fact is that everyone is on the same team when it comes to project failure and success. We are all aimed at improving business performance.
• As a Business Architect. Do the analysis and help justify why cancelling a project early or retiring a failed solution helps avoid an underperforming business in terms of reducing costs, improving productivity, simplifies strategy execution, etc. Always paint the picture in a positive light based on engineering rigor tracing back to defined business objectives. See here for details. Again, participate in the failure as a project team member. Do not take an “outsiders position”. That leads to ivory tower syndrome and distrust. The fact is that everyone is on the same team when it comes to project failure and success. We are all aimed at improving business performance.

I’d like to add something here. I don’t think that every org should have a standard set of roles that are copy’n pasted from some industry team model. Each company and organization within a company will have a very different situation than another. For example, one company may be in the throes of economic turmoil and require a focus on scaling down the infrastructure to reduce costs. In this example situation, an EA team may not need to have a dedicated title of “Enterprise Solution Architect”, “Solution Architect” or “Business Architect” but rather have the titles necessary to focus on the discipline that relates closest to the area being addressed; “Infrastructure Architect” in this example. Of course, all scale-down situations like this need a dash of the other Architecture disciplines to build out the related artifacts to ensure engineering rigor is performed. For example, a situation may not require a full-time Information Architect. Fine, however, the Architect roles that are full-time must perform a bit of information architecture rigor to build their artifacts. I suppose I’m just highlighting this to you so as not to fall into the trap of assuming each named architecture skill or discipline requires a dedicated architect title in an arch team or that if there isn’t a titled architect in the team, none of related artifacts are necessary.