Master Class
Agile EA: cherry-picking joining Business Architecture and SCRUM
Thursday, April 30
13:15 – 14:45
Room 3
Eskil Swende
Partner & Senior Consultant, IRM Sweden
The development teams work fast and with good priority. The Business Architects synchronies the development teams to find the right direction in the short term development adding value to the product owner and where the long term architecture becomes stable and sustainable.
Architects are often criticized to be too slow when developing the overall architecture in their enterprise. When their overall architecture is finished they are often criticized, because it is difficult to understand, difficult to use and the quality of the architecture is not acceptable.
How these problems may be solved in theory and in Practice at the Swedish Board of Agriculture (SBA) is described in this article. During an architectural journey they gradually learned how to work with Enterprise Architecture (EA) in a new way. The reason was a large program with a lot of uncertainty, rapid changes and strong deadlines. The solution was Agile EA.
By combining agile methods with more traditional EA work, we have found a way to develope the EA step by step based on current needs - while supporting and participating in the projects.
A number of Critical Success Factors are in place at SBA; some due to hard work and some by lucky circumstances in our environment. The agile development method Scrum was the standard development method in use. In this very ambitious program, Scrum has been successfully related to the EA.
Agile EA is used in Practice managing both iterative development of the EA and guiding and supporting the development of new IT solutions.
This ambitious program at SBA may be regarded as a global breakthrough to achieve an Agile EA in Practice based on the EA Theory developed at IRM in Sweden in cooperation with global EA experts and Universities.