I work with organisations across the full programme lifecycle — from initial vision and architecture through to delivery, recovery, and strategic governance. What follows is a summary of the specific areas where I can help.
When you have a vision of what you want or where you want to go, but are not quite sure of the best way to get there, I can help with:
Understanding, defining and agreeing on what you want to achieve isn’t always as easy as it sounds. I am experienced at facilitating in-person and online workshops with senior leaders to capture in diagrams and words the big picture. I can also help organisations figure out where they should be spending on change — see LITSO.
As an Enterprise Architect for over 30 years I have extensive experience taking stakeholders through option analysis, best practices, and when to go traditional versus adopting emerging technologies. My HLDs clearly address:
There are generally two approaches to building large, multi-dimensional plans. One is to ask tower leads, product owners and experts to build their plans and hand them to the programme manager to assemble. The other — which I strongly favour — is to build an overarching high-level plan across all dimensions first, establishing sequencing and inter-workstream dependencies, then fan these out to tower leads to fill in the detail, which rolls back up into the master plan.
Having designed multiple programmes in the tens of millions of pounds, euros and dollars, this approach consistently delivers better outcomes. It requires deep grounding across project and programme methodology, business architecture, applications and infrastructure, security, BCP&DR, and IT service management — which is exactly the breadth I bring.
Clearly presenting the background, the problems being solved and objectives to be met, the options considered and chosen and why, the costs based on the WBS, and defining the tangible and intangible benefits, assumptions, risks and dependencies — including a Risk Plan based on ABCD — as well as the plan to deliver on the intended outcomes and how it will be governed and kept on track. My Business Cases give stakeholders and decision makers as clear as possible a recommendation on why to invest, what to invest, how it will be delivered and how it will be governed.
I can help an organisation design an appropriately sized governance model, based on the scope, criticality, risks and context of what they are trying to achieve.
I have successfully led many projects and large programmes around the world. Having a good understanding of many aspects of the whole — including the business model, applications and infrastructure landscape, software development frameworks, security frameworks, and what sponsors and stakeholders need to have visibility of to properly govern and feel confident in how things are proceeding — quite often means that things proceed at a faster than normal pace.
Applying my experience and POSM, I help organisations figure out why an initiative may be off track and where to focus to bring it back. Where appropriate, I also apply ABCD to validate and update the assumptions, risks and dependencies log.
I have helped several large financial services organisations develop and improve their EA capabilities, whether applying TOGAF, Zachman, or my own framework QBAM.