Checking the checklist…

Since Im all for going back and reviewing the work done, I often find it amusing/insightful to read articles concerning checklists and scorecards. Most often checklists are way too subjectively developed and therefore not too helpful. But in this months Architecture & Governance I actually found a good one.

Patrick Motola writes a comprehensive scorecard for ” measuring you organizations progress [with EA]” and it very accurately put its finger on the many problems and mistakes during our work here at DR. A good example is the part about “The EA Mission must be supported by management and the organization” that have the three following checkboxes:

-Adequate resources comitted by management

-Acceptance and support of the mission by all critical groups

-Benefits to the organization are understood and believed.

Since I wasn´t able to check any of those boxes, I suddenly realised how wrong we do things. We´re fighting a brave fight even though we are way too few people for the job and maybe it would be better to stop working and push management into giving us more resources. Or at least to narrow our immediate focus…

We haven’t got neither acceptance or support from the people that should be our stakeholders. It was too much of an effort to get in touch with everyone in the business (we belong to the IT department), and none of us were focusing on communication, really. So now we are 2 years into the program and alot of potential stakeholders dont know we exist…

Benefits understood and believed? Again, lack of communication on our part makes it incredibly hard for people to understand, let alone believe. Thats like Moses coming of the mountain with blank stonetables trying to persuade everyone to quit the golden calf!

Oh well, going through the rest of the scorecard suddenly seemed irrelevant, since these areas aren´t even covered by our program. But I can tell you, no pencils were worn out checking those boxes…

Even though I knew the above, it really makes you think when you cant check those initial and very basic boxes. So if you think you might have missed a few, or maybe just to make sure you´re dead on with everything, subscribe to the magazine and read the article. Maybe it will be worth your time, it certainly was for me.