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It must also be fit to purpose, which means understanding deeply what the real purpose of the system is, and how to manage user expectations.
Must fit purpose
The nonfunctional requirements are properties of the system that do not necessarily appear directly to the user.
Strategy is the art of creating power.
Strategy is the art of creating power.
Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History (Oxford University
What culture, attitude, and skills are required?
What a strategist asks.....
“using fact-based analysis to spot industry shifts and to understand their own companies’ sources of competitive advantage as a foundation for clear, differentiated strategies.”
Figure 1-1. The triumvirate dominating forces of strategy, culture, and execution
Strategy, culture, and execution are the three core principles in strategy design.
Logic Tree is used by strategy consultants as a simple tool for determining a set of relevant problems and possible causes. It helps organize your ideas, making quick work of examining any problem.
If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is. Unnamed engineering professor at Yale, via William Markle
The PESTEL analysis is a simple framework for understanding the broad political, macroeconomic, social, and technological trends operating in the world outside. It helps give you necessary context to make your technology direction in harmony with the conditions informing your business. The work you do here can feed Scenario Planning.
Look up he PESTeL framework
The Futures Funnel is a diagram that presents in one compelling picture your conjecture of different possible ways your company’s future could play out. I’ve found it to be a quick, easy, and provocative way to have a level-setting conversation with executives to ensure that you have the right focus and common
What
Scenario Planning is an an organized way of asking the question “What if—?”
Its history traces back to the 1950s at the RAND corporation, where a fellow named Herman Kahn devised the tool to test a variety of military strategies that could be employed against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. You can read more about the history of Scenario Planning in the Harvard Business Review.
Scenario Planning
Scenario Planning is not rocket science. It’s mostly about carving out the time for the leadership team to get out of daily operations and think about the future with a diverse crowd so they can gain additional perspectives on how well they are positioned in the market, what competitors or substitutes might be coming for them, and what opportunities they have to grow the business.
it. Eventually, however, when the tech becomes very widespread, it becomes like a commodity relative to its use value, where there is precious little differentiation.
The
particular industry so that your tech strategy can take it into account.
Framework to help us with our tech strategy
Strategy without tactics is the longest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Sun Tzu
Strategy n tactics
The first is for you to spend time doing stuff that doesn’t matter to the people who matter. If the work you’re doing does not matter to the executive leadership in your company, you face a choice.
If you want to get something meaningful done, you must first understand the organization chart.
Understand the org chart
Creating the list is simple. It will serve as a building block for other useful documents, such as the Stakeholder Matrix (see “Stakeholder Matrix”) and the RACI chart (see “RACI”
See http://bit.ly/2MlCIpr for a tutorial or download my template from http://www.aletheastudio.com. You can now use the scores to plot your stakeholders on a 2×2 chart with influence on the y-axis and impact on the x-axis. It contains four quadrants, as shown in Figure 5-1:
Templates
Figure 5-1. Once your matrix is complete, the names will appear in the quadrants
Leverage for own work
The primary mistake I see people make in RACIs is the temptation to assign multiple people as accountable for a given item.
Assign a single person
What are the environmental threats as suggested by a PESTEL (see “PESTEL”)? What substitutes might be introduced, even by a company with no direct aim of toppling you? What competitors are squarely aiming for you and your customers, and what are their methods, and what threats do they present as suggested by the Five Forces (as described in “Porter’s Five Forces”)? How do you stay relevant?
Porters five forcea pestel
The Growth-Share Matrix is also known as the “BCG Box.” It was created by Bruce Henderson in 1970 for the Boston Consulting Group. It
Managing portfolio
The purpose of the Investment Map is to help you temper and balance the exciting, cool things that you want to do, the level of difficulty and preparedness you’ll need to pull them off, how ready you hypothesize (see “Hypothesis”) the market is to receive them, and how big the barriers might be.
Investment maps
This pattern helps you organize your thoughts, and consider the department holistically in the following situations:
A principle is a proposition (as we saw in Chapter 2). It serves as the foundation for a system of beliefs.
Services and applications of the platform should be built ready to run in the cloud and take advantage of such features as autoscaling and other auxiliary components while maintaining portability within the application structure. Services should externalize configurations to account for such portability. Infrastructure as code should be employed. Services must expect to be deployed globally across multiple cloud data centers, and thus should externalize their localized values and internationalizeable application qualities. They should be stateless, and their data should be partitioned to
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The Process Posture Map gives you a picture of either 1) elements of your current state that need to be supported or revised or 2) a practical map of how everything in your enterprise architecture will work together.
Examine the technology landscape for trends in new practices. Make a Process
Study the landscape
Process posture map
Posture Map for your current state practices. Make a Current State and Future State Operating Model.
Recall Michael Porter’s Value Chain (see “Value Chain”)—a purposeful network of business processes that, when designed together, cumulatively transform a set of inputs into an output of greater value to customers and deliver it to them. How well do these processes work together? As a collective set, are they MECE?
Current and Future State Operating Model Next, create a simple slide that looks something like Figure 6-3. This model helps your teams see where they are (recall the “this is water” joke from “This Is Water”) and where your department needs to go. You can then have managers figure out how to draw the connections themselves for how to change the current state into the future state. You made the vision; now let them put together what exactly needs to change to get you there. They should come back with proposals with concrete actions (using an RACI as described in “RACI”) and then you can track
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A Sankey diagram is a way of showing how energy flows in a system: what direction and in what magnitude. I’ve adopted Sankeys to show myself and my teams that our principles all had at least some practices to realize them and those practices were all realized by one or more tools.
You can generate your own Sankey diagram with a free online tool called SankeyMATIC. It’s great. You enter your plain-text list of principles, practices, tools, and
Sankymatic
It’s not hard to do, but like drawing UML diagrams, it is sort of detailed, and you want to get the notation right. You can read the (very long) spec at http://www.omg.org/bpmn. Read books and get tools from various vendors (https://bpmn.io offers many wonderful examples, and Visio and LucidChart work well) to help you draw proper BPMN diagrams. Figure 6-5 shows an example.
What risks do you have in the portfolio? Where should you focus thought and design effort?
What is the business value versus costs to maintain the application? What is the expected future business value or goals for the application? What are the skills required to maintain and grow the application in the future, and how well positioned are we for such support? What is the application health level, and what risk does that pose to the business? How ready is the application to undergo certain known or postulated initiatives, such as a move to the cloud or legacy transformation?
AWS, compute and storage in the form of S3 or EC2 are not in the infrastructure: they are strategic, because they are competing diligently with other cloud companies. Unless you’re in the cloud provider business, it’s pretty certain that storage and compute for you belong to infrastructure. All too often, infrastructure teams get caught up in a “gatekeeper” mentality, rather than serving
Map an outline of three bullet points in your head, and then give the executives the simple, declarative, definitive answer.
Stop talking and let the executive proceed. They will either make a decision, or follow up on the points they are interested in if they want more information.
Strategy consultants are sometimes called “Rented Brains.” They get invited in, they get asked hard questions, and then they research and put together a deck with their recommendations.
The good leader constantly asks her team for the bad news.
Put a simpler way: speak truth to power. Tell powerful people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. You’ll be seen as (and actually be) honest, forthright, forthcoming, objective, strong, confident, and smart. These are cherished, and rare, qualities.
You can use facts and logic and data and be right, and still lose.
According to Aristotle, to make a truly persuasive argument, include three key elements: Logical arguments (logos) Ethical arguments (ethos) Emotional arguments (pathos)
