This checklist helps you evaluate your organization’s readiness to run a development project efficiently.
Solid enterprise architecture practice in place
A solid enterprise architecture practice offers significant advantages to the project:
- Current processes are well-documented and well-managed. Process owners are known and are ready to help allocate subject matter experts to participate in the activities.
- The current application landscape is well-documented. System owners are known and are ready to help coordinate test and deployment activities.
- The infrastructure and currently used technologies are well-documented and well-managed. Experts are available and ready to advise the project.
- Procedures for handover to operations are well-documented, and operations specialists are ready to advise on the project.
A weak or no enterprise architecture practice means that the project faces an uphill battle on all fronts. Much more business analysis work is necessary to uncover the business model and all its key elements, like processes and resources. Additionally, the project must assess the current infrastructure and identify existing applications.
In short, the project needs to develop a complete picture of the prevailing enterprise architecture to successfully design, develop, and implement a well-fitting solution. Time and budget limitations may not even be the biggest challenge – the organization may resist participating in establishing the required understanding of the enterprise architecture because it highlights inadequacies in how the business has been managed so far.
Lean development process in place
A lean development process enables the project to work faster and with more precision:
- The project team knows exactly which work products to make, and templates, guidance and examples are readily available.
- The project’s stakeholders can easily understand the project team’s plans because information is structured in a familiar way.
An inadequate development process forces the project team to spend excessive time on bloated or meaningless work products.
The lack of a development process forces the project teams to invent one on the fly, which slows down the pace and steals focus from the development of the solution. Additionally, the team will struggle with stakeholders who will have diverse opinions about the process and its deliverables.
Proper tooling in place
Having the right tools available helps the project team solve problems more easily, capture and share information efficiently, and build deliverables more quickly:
- Cloud-based documentation and task management tools are easy to share with everyone involved in the project, inside and outside the organization.
- Development work requires diagramming and writing tools to create the necessary work products.
- Feature-rich development environments speed up coding and debugging.
- Continuous testing and deployment reveal bugs early.
Poor tooling slows down the project team’s pace and will likely result in poorer documentation.