Phase E – Creating the To-Do List

Once you have your baseline and your target architecture, it is time to create the roadmap or, what I would like to call, the “To Do” list.

To build the “To Do” list, we need

• Where we are at (the Baseline Architecture)
• Where we want to go (the Target Architecture)
• The list of projects and service delivery activities currently in progress directly impacting your architecture – I would go to our Incident Management and Project Management systems for this information.
• Any information about the architectures that interface with your architecture – so for the Learning architecture in my environment, I will collect baseline and target architectures + project activities for:
• Communications
• Identity
• HRIS
• Document Management
• Academics

From here, I would start figuring out what needs to happen.
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TOGAF defines 11 steps in this process.

1. Determine or confirm key corporate change attributes – A handy tool for doing this is a Factor Assessment and Deduction Matrix. Factors include Risks, Issues, Assumptions, Dependencies, Actions and Impacts. 
2. Determine business constraints for implementation – Take a look at business drivers (internal and external) and any constraints at both the line of business and corporate levels.  What does your environment look like?
3. Review and consolidate gap analysis – This is where you look at the business, application, data and any infrastructure architectures you have and analyze the difference between where you are at and where you want to be.
4. Review consolidated business requirements across related business functions – Otherwise known as looking for trends and patterns across your requirements. Do you have multiple people asking for the same thing?
5. Consolidate and reconcile interoperability requirements – Otherwise known as figuring out how the pieces of your system need to talk to each other.  Hopefully, you are working with a knowledgable IT buddy for this.
6. Refine and validate dependencies – Analyzing what needs to happen when.  What is the order and priority of activities to get you from here to there?
7. Confirm readiness and risk for business transformation – Risk analysis can be a big deal. Especially in risk-averse organizations.  Make sure you are really clear about the risks involved in the transformation you propose and that you are able to clearly communicate a mitigation strategy for these risks.
8. Formulate implementation and migration strategy – High level to-do list
9. Identify and group major work packages – More granular to-do list. This should include the list of projects that you wish to initiate and complete to get from baseline to target.
10. Identify transition architectures – Create the steps between here and there.  Where are our “pause” points?  Ideally, this is where we have something operational as we move to the next thing.
11. Create the architecture roadmap and implementation and migration plan – This is the final deliverable and the plan you will execute against.  

This sounds like an awful lot of stuff, but really it is about figuring out how you want to get to where you want to be.

Essentially, it is project planning.
Defining the why and what.
Providing a path to help minimize distraction.