Teamwork

The perpetual question for enterprise architects is, which is the best enterprise architecture management tool. I have my favourite based on the past years experience, which I selected after a careful analysis of potential candidates. One of my clients requested a comparison between two tools and I would share the results here. Shortly the two tools are SAMU from Atoll and EA from Sparx. The summary of the comparison is, that they have to exchange the name they have! SAMU (System Architecture Management Utility) is a real enterprise architecture management tool, with all necessary aspects, while EA (Enterprise Architect) is a great system design tool, with very limited capability to be extend to enterprise wide repository.

Today, all companies wants to become agile. This is great. Most of them wants to be agile by applying one of the Agile methodologies. What is strange. Let’s go through the intention, what shrives this „agility movement“!

I saw and heard many times (certainly not at you), that professionality is over in the IT field. Quality falls, deadlines are missed, costs are increasing and the joy of creation lost somewhere on the road. In the past everything was better and so. 

What could be the reason? Large projects are still exists, empowering targets are still there, more money spent then ever - it seems to be a perfect situation to fly and still... I collected you some reasons for those cases when this bad feeling is right. Some ammo for the feeling of 'anno Domini'.

What is the best development methodology? Waterfall? Agile? An iterative model? Something else? Companies and projects are looking to find the best approach to deliver on time and on budget and still keeping the scope. People are arguing in personal discussions and forums highlighting pros and cons about their best one, but I did not see the ultimate answer. Now I can help you to have it!

The eternal question is if size matters or not? One says it is important others think it is not, while there are people saying: it depends. What is the best size? Sure you may say the larger is better? You are maybe right. May be not... Come and read more to get the answer!

The best team is where all members can say: the team cannot be successful without me and I cannot be successful without them.

This is an extra mind of me for the Do you need a team player? article.

The best answer in IT for the question is 0 with a carry flag. Team building approaches have different answers they think it is more than 2 what is the math answer. Is there any cases when the result is less?

Assuming that the result is the value for money or the ability to change ratio in the architecture then yes, there are many cases when the performance will be much worse if you have 1+1 instead of tan appropriate 1.

The following stories are not real they did not happen neither mine nor your past!

The automatic answer for the question is: yes, certainly. The actual cultural flow as that each time you have to play the role of team members. At every day; in every projects and activities. Are there any issues with this approach? Unfortunately yes. Come to read them.

Like great archers we have the right tool (the Bow), the models and processes (the Arrow) and the experiences (the Training). All the things needed for Architects is ready in our Archery program.