Understanding Your Roles: Enterprise Architecture vs Project Management
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become the fastest growing and in-demand management principle that is now defining as effective and sustainable IT best practices adopted in organisations. Large organisations must overcome the complexity when scaling up their operations in order to plan and execute IT projects successfully. The heavy burden of complexity in IT shows that the organisations lack visibility of the consequences during any proposed technology projects.
Project management and EA in business settings are different units that have overlapped responsibilities and value to the organisation. organisations need to be able to define these roles to distinguish the specific value offered.
To ensure coordinated IT projects across the entire organisation, the project management office needs a clearer view of how the project may impact the business and technology landscape. When organisations link together between EA and Project management practices in prioritising the technology projects, fast and minimal risk implementation can be guaranteed as EA is able to tie all domains of the organisation and they are able to work together to ensure IT projects’ success even with different specialised skillsets.
Tying Enterprise Architecture and Project Management
In order for EA and project management to be able to complement each other, there are a few things that should be considered to create value through collaboration and common delivery touch points in a typical technology project.
- -Develop robust unified governance for EA and Project Management to identify and align common governance points within an organisation to simplify where commonly possible.
- -Establish groups that have a specific goal and structure in support of Enterprise Architecture and Project Management to collaborate within the organisation. The particular reason for the circumstance is to better deliver the IT architecture projects with minimal risks.
- -Review, document, and train the organisation on both EA and Project Management processes’ touch points for the exact purpose of enabling flexibility within the organisation and to ensure compliance for governance activities.
- -Create and constantly update a central EA repository as a single-source-of-truth for all relevant IT projects, EA and Project Management artefacts that include current and future state, standards, and governance that can be leveraged and reused for consistency, traceability and acceleration.
Author: Aaron Tan Dani
President of Singapore Computer Society EA-Chapter aarontan@scs.org.sg
Founder and Chairman of Iasa Asia Pacific aarontan@iasahome.org
Aaron Tan Dani, Chief Architect of ATD Solution aarontan@atdsolution.com
Related websites:
Join the EA activities in Singapore and learn how you can implement Digital-Business-driven EA in your organisation.
Computer Society EA-Chapter: Home - Singapore Computer Society (scs.org.sg) and
Learn more about ITABoK (IT Architecture Body of Knowledge) skillsets and about the roles, scopes and impacts of EA Specializations.
IASA: www.iasahome.org
Acquire successful Digital Transformation adoption with ATD Enterprise Architecture consulting and training services.
ATD Solution: www.atdsolution.com
