It is a good idea to look beyond just satisfying your customer when designing services and business systems? There are usually many stakeholders who have an interest in your solution, and who can affect its success.

This is the third in my series of articles for Enterprise Blueprints:

If you missed any of the articles, they are available here:

1. Trade/Off
2. Functional
3. Who is your customer?

If you and your team would like to apply everything discussed in these articles in your architectural work, the Architecture Analysis course is a 2-day course that covers this material in depth, providing teams with the tools and knowledge to put it all into practice.

Does this distinction really make sense? See my thoughts on the subject in the second of three articles published by Enterprise Blueprints on their site.

And if you and your colleagues want to delve deeper into this and other topics related to architectural thinking, consider the 2-day Architecture Analysis Course.

I’m looking forward to co-presenting a paper at EuroSPI 2022 (European System, Software and Service Process Improvement and Innovation) with colleagues from Volkswagen AG. Our paper, Product and Service Quality Risk design considerations – integration into solution architecture methods, describes how we’ve brought together the PQR approach to design thinking developed at Volkswagen, and SARM, developed by Lefert Consulting, and embedded them into the architecture engagement model being used at the Bank of England. The resulting architecture analysis training course, described here, has been used to train more than 35 architects, business analysts and senior engineers and designers at the Bank.

I am honoured to have been invited by Enterprise Blueprints to contribute a series of articles that will appear over the coming months on the News and Views page of their website.

The first article has just been published. You can read it here:

A two-day Architecture Analysis training course is now available for delivery on-site. Centred around the Solution Architecture Review Method (SARM), it covers all aspects of architecture analysis including:

• Risk trade-off analysis
• Architecturally Significant Requirements and Decisions
• Quality Attributes and Quality Models
• Functional and non-functional requirements
• Stakeholder analysis
• Benefits realisation
• Cost benefit analysis

Over the two days, participants develop a case study working in groups, considering requirements, developing a service concept, applying design thinking methods to improve their designs, then collaborating on a trade-off analysis of the competing solutions. Following a single case study from inception through to evaluation of competing designs helps to build a comprehensive understanding of this critical capability.

A more complex worked example is also explored, enabling participants to see how analysis can be conducted on a substantial business system.

See here for a more detailed overview of the course agenda.

Contact us for details.

Our first “packaged” offering will be a training course to help architects and their organisations adopt the Solution Architecture Review Method (SARM) as part of their architectural practices. The course will be aimed primarily at enterprise, solution and software architects, but as the method was developed with both IT and Service architectures in mind, it can also be of interest to Service Designers.

The course will be given by the originator of SARM, Dr Simon Field, principal consultant at Lefert Consulting. Further details about the course will be posted here, but if you have an interest in hosting the course at your organisation, please do contact us.