TOGAF 9 Migration Planning and Project Portfolio Management

Phase F in TOGAF helps to describe how to create a viable implementation and migration plan in co-operation with the portfolio and project managers. Very often companies already have in place a Project Portfolio Management framework and there may be a need to integrate your enterprise architecture with that.

As an example, PMI has introduced a standard for Portfolio Management, and portfolio managers have a resource to help them develop professionally and achieve success for themselves and their enterprise. Within an organization, a portfolio represents a collection of active programs, projects and other work undertaken at a specific point in time to help the organization achieve strategic objectives. In essence, a portfolio reflects the priorities, investments and resource allocations.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) may be part of an enterprise governance framework. It is a management process designed to help the organization-:

-To ensure that the organization is doing the "right things", optimally allocating scarce resources toward the enterprise’s objectives
-To acquire and view information about all projects
-To sort and prioritize each project according to certain criteria, such as strategic value, resource impact, cost, and so on.

PPM has several activities which are similar to the objectives of managing a financial portfolio:

-The identification of all the individual demands in the portfolio
-The development of a "big picture" view and a deeper understanding of the collection as a whole
-The sensible sorting, adding, and removing of items from the collection based on their costs, benefits, and alignment with long-term strategies or goals.

In a nutshell, Portfolio Management can help zero in on the projects that are most worth their effort; project management can help execute those projects most efficiently.

These activities can be perfectly integrated with Phase F of TOGAF. Once the work packages, projects and building blocks inventory is created, the enterprise architecture team with the portfolio managers (and other important stakeholders) will examine each project and prioritize it according to established criteria. They will probably assign a business value; conduct a cost business analysis for each project (done in collaboration with business people); identify the risks to the projects.

The overall list of projects is then considered to develop a well-balanced list of supported projects and provide an input for a detailed implementation and migration plan. It will also help to confirm the Transition Architecture defined in the phase E. The use of an Architecture definition increments table is highly recommended to list these projects.

Some projects will be given high priority and extensive support, some will be given moderate priority, and still others will be placed on hold or dropped entirely from the list. This will also help to finalize the Architecture roadmap. Finally, resources will need to be identified and made available.

Other Governance domains may also be to be integrated in the PPM process and Phase F, such as Risk Management (e.g. RiskIT), Project Management (e.g. PMI, PRINCE 2), etc.

Companies who are mature in Portfolio Management activities may integrate their existing work practices easily with TOGAF. This would enforce the relationship between the Enterprise Architecture team and the PMO (or the PPM team).

(You can also refer to another post: Why do we not find yet links between Enterprise Architecture and Project Portfolio Management? )

Requirements Management and Enterprise Architecture

I was describing a while ago the relations between Requirements Management and other types of user’s demands.

Let me restate my definition of what that is. Requirements Management is the science and art of gathering and managing user, business, technical, functional requirements, and process requirements within a product development project. The project could be for a new consumer product, a web site, a system or a software application. In all these cases, the five classes of requirements should be represented.

The objective of the Requirements Management activity is to define a process whereby requirements for Enterprise Architecture are identified, stored, and fed into and out of the relevant Enterprise Architecture development phases. As such it forms part of the activities and steps carried out in each of these phases though it is not referred to implicitly in any projects I have managed.

(Requirements Management is also a discipline for both Quality Management (ISO 90001:2000) and Project Management (PMI)).

Target architecture must be based on credible assumptions about future business requirements. Getting these future requirements is not a simple matter of asking business management for them, and analyzing them is not the linear technique used to develop the design for a project. Instead, we have to use a combination of requirements aggregation and scenarios to gather and analyze long-term requirements. This will lead to more credible architectures with appropriate flexibility and evident business value.
For ease of use, it is convenient to think of requirements as belonging to a type.

• Business and Functional requirements

They are the fundamental or essential subject matter of the service or product. They describe what the service or product has to do or what processing actions it is to take.

Business Cases or Scenarios should be used as a useful technique to discover and document these requirements.

Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) addresses the decisions regarding what projects to undertake, with what priority, and in what sequence. Before a project has gone through the necessary requirements definition activities, its scope is based on high-level requirements derived from business drivers, plans, and needs. If these requirements are viewed in isolation, then solutions will be defined in isolation, and they will ignore synergies or dependencies between projects and undervalue foundational projects that provide capabilities that can be leveraged across future projects. Business Requirements also have to be a source for Project Management methodologies.

• Non-functional requirements

They are the properties that the functions must have, such as performance and usability. These requirements are as important as the functional requirements for the product/service’s success.

• Project constraints

These are restrictions on projects due to the budget or the time available to build a product or service.

• Design and architecture requirements

They impose restrictions on how the product/service must be designed. For example, it might have to be implemented in the hand-held device being given to major customers, or it might have to use the existing servers and desktop computers, or any other hardware, software, or business practice.

• Project drivers

These are the business-related forces. For example, the purpose of the project is a project driver, as are all of the stakeholders-each for different reasons.

• Project issues

They define the conditions under which the project will be done. The reason for including them as part of the requirements is to present a coherent picture of all factors that contribute to the success or failure of the project and to illustrate how managers can use requirements as input when managing a project.

• Testing requirements

It is recommended to start testing requirements as soon as we start writing them.
We make a requirement testable by adding its fit criterion. This fit criterion measures the requirement, making it possible to determine whether a given solution fits the requirement. If a fit criterion cannot be found for a requirement, then the requirement is either ambiguous or poorly understood. All requirements can be measured, and all should carry a fit criterion.


Requirements Management and Enterprise Architecture cannot be dissociated.

Some vendors have perfectly understood the need of integrating this, such as Telelogic and the need to share a common metadata repository.

With that solution, there are possibilities to go from requirements, to enterprise architecture, to systems implementation and design, with tightly-coupled, bi-directional integration between DOORS (their requirements management tool), and Systems Architect.

IBM has it’s own requirements management solution but has (not yet) an enterprise architecture solution. This may change with the on-going acquisition of Telelogic, but I haven’t been really able to understand IBM’s strategy yet. Is this only a question of absorbing another market or a willingness to offer a full Enterprise Architecture suite in the Rational catalogue? (Requisitepro being obviously an issue….).

The HP approach seems to be the how to integrate the different application coming from the former Mercury and Peregrine world. HP PPM (and HP Quality Center for testing requirements). Their current approach is to use the Demand management module in PPM to manage business requirement at business level and using the module in Quality Center to specify the requirements at technical level to translate them in test case. Nevertheless, HP does not have any Enterprise Architecture solution.