Starting Point - December 2009

No one in the Enable team had experience of Enterprise Architecture or TOGAF, however due to the combined research of the Project Manager and Technical Manager it was the chosen method for Enable to help them manage supporting the various change inititatives in the university, and as a way of communicating the need to change how we do things - that we needed to think about aligning business processes, systems and data. The Technical Manager took on the main role of Enterprise Architect along with his development role, while the Project Manager tried a more informal role to support the work of the Technical Manager.

At the start of the journey we began with the Technical Manager sitting the TOGAF qualification. Both the TM and PM started with one to one discussions with staff to talk about the status of curriculum design and development as it stands in the university.

First Stage Issues

We encountered some big issues straight away with using EA modelling:

• no real examples of the level we would need to model - to begin with we started doing models with too much detail
• the university was already in a state of change, capturing an "As  Is" model was harder than first thought
• scoping the model was important (making sure that we did not try and cover everything straight away but also ensuring we did not miss anything important)
• software was limited in its support with BizzDesign licenses being very expensive
• Difficult to do the "to be" model without clear Executive lead

Joining Up

Fortunately at this point the Flexible Service Delivery (FSD) programme manager contacted the Enable project team as there was a clear link from Enable into FSD with the team aspiring to embed Enterprise Architecture as an approach at the university to deliver & sustain business and technology alignments and improvements. The FSD programme has been a very important support tool for the Enable team, enabling them to get together with others taking the EA journey, to share experiences and use the knowledge from those institutions further down the EA road. 

2010 Achievements

The overall EA practice at the university is a bottom up approach. As the project team continued to speak to stakeholders involved in CDD and to model the whole of CDD it was clear that trying to communicate the issues around CDD using the "uber" model would be too difficult. Therefore, as part of the pilot phase of the Enable project, a small demonstration project was run around supporting external examiners. This mini project was designed to demonstrate to the Senior Managers/ Executive the benefits to using EA and TOGAF and to enable the approach to EA be moved from bottom up to top down. This project was a success for communicating how important it is to model our processes, data and systems before making any changes to CDD (either process/ system/ data) - the "As Is" model showed duplication of effort for staff and duplication of data held in different systems, the "To Be" model showed clearly how that duplication could be eliminated with a small application change. The project also showed that by engaging stakeholders at the start of the project to ask them the good, bad and ugly about the existing process they have been happy to engage with the changes proposed.

Not only has the project team created a detailed model of the processes/data/roles supporting external examiners (see Enable - Managing Information) the team has continued to work on the full CDD model and encouraging the partner colleges involved in Enable to create models of their own with regards to how they manage the CDD relationship with Staffordshire University.

To the Future

Ideally as we move into 2011 and the last phases of Enable we want to see that Senior Management/ Executive appreciate the requirement in the institution to create a Change Management office, to include Enterprise Architecture at its core.  The project team has created a Managing Information document that has been passed on to the senior management team. This document highlights a number of actions, including additional resource to allow modelling to become central to the institution.

Relevant Links

“Just enough EA”- a set of institutional case studies of using TOGAF and Archimate (pdf)

Enable - Modelling - Our EA Journey  - page created from the report given to the Flexible Service Delivery Programme, written by the Technical Manager for Enable.