Architect Core
September 18, 2024 2025-01-28 17:59Architect Core
Architect Core
Welcome to the IASA Core course! Also called Iasa Foundation, this is course has been taught to thousands globally. It is an absolute pleasure working with architects from all over the world on understanding and growing our professional practice. We hope to work with you as well both to teach and to learn. The Iasa curriculum is designed by architects, with architects and for architects. It is my life’s mission and true joy to have seen these ideas emerge and take root in our field.
What You Will Learn
- What are architecture lifecycles, deliverables, and engagements.
- Methods to work across business, technical and management stakeholders.
- Ways of understanding and using customer centric design approaches.
- Tools and techniques for value measurement, tradeoff analysis, design and quality attributes.
- Measurable impact to business value, project management, and delivery
- Critical skills in navigating change management from ideation to execution.
- Stakeholder management and better human dynamic skills
- Quality Attributes, Design Structures and Analysis
- Describe an architecture using multiple viewpoints to define its total shape and impacts in both functional and quality attributes
- Rigor in both design and execution environments
Competency Focus Areas
This course specifically looks to improve the students understanding and skills in the following BTABoK Competency Areas.
Our online courses offer a flexible learning experience that caters to different learning styles. You can progress through the course materials at your own pace throughout the week, including video lectures, interactive discussions, and assignments.
Who is this course for?
The IASA Core Course is ideal for IT professionals interested in transitioning to BT architecture roles, experienced BT architects seeking formal recognition, technical team leaders wanting to deepen their strategic and business-focused architectural knowledge, and business analysts aiming to bridge the gap between business and technology.
What you'll learn
- What are architecture lifecycles, deliverables, and engagements.
- Methods to work across business, technical and management stakeholders.
- Ways of understanding and using customer centric design approaches.
- Tools and techniques for value measurement, tradeoff analysis, design and quality attributes.
- Critical skills in navigating change management from ideation to execution.
- Better ways to combine agile delivery with architecture excellence.
- How to improve an architecture practice engagement model.
Lesson 1
Introduction
The introduction gives you a long view of the entire course and introduces you to the tools and resources available to you.
Lesson 2
Architecture Core Concepts
Understand and manage the ‘Red Thread’ of architecture from innovation to maturity. This lesson introduces the core concepts from the BTABoK.
Lesson 3
Business Models
Building architectures is always understanding your clients business and that starts with where they make money. Learning business models makes for better decisions and better architecture.
Lesson 4
Customer Driven
Customer and client obsession are a part of every great architects skills. This lesson lays out the customer journey and customer personas we use to understand and feel our customers pain. These techniques work for customers, clients and stakeholders alike.
Lesson 5
Capabilities and Operations
An organization is shaped by the capabilities which drive its operations. Understanding these critical areas provides a rich ground in which to create and deliver architecture excellence as well as business language necessary to deliver successfully.
Lesson 6
Value and Benefits
Great architecture is always about value. But understanding value is hard. This lesson explores what it means to create a great solution. A great architecture. How do our clients measure success? And how do we prioritize architectural outputs and decisions? Understanding value puts you back in charge of your decisions.
Lesson 7
Roadmapping
A set of projects and products have many dependencies on each other. Through management of business cases, dependencies and tradeoffs architects create a realistic outcome based roadmap at both the strategic and product level. These techniques are essential both for management and delivery.
Lesson 8
Architecture Descriptions
Learning how to describe architectures in visual, verbal and written contexts is a major architecture skillset. Bad designs account for huge failures in projects and change. This lesson focuses on the techniques architects use to describe, document, design and ultimately deliver architecture.
Lesson 9
Stories and Requirements
Requirements, stories, use cases are all ways of saying similar things. What do we envision a system doing when it is deployed. This lesson provides a deep guide in architecturally signficant requirements. How to manage, trace, understand and make them come true!
Lesson 10
Options and Decisions
The core of rigorous design is the options and decisions which drive the outcome. Single option decisions account for a huge amount of the technical debt created in projects. This lesson focuses on making better decisions using an informed set of options.
Lesson 11
Structure and Principles
Decisions lead to design structures, these structures lead to the final shape of a system. These structures whether they deal with quality attributes, legacy integration, data movement or other structural needs are what create both longevity and value in an architecture. The principles that guide these patterns are also covered here.
Lesson 12
Architecture Assessment
Often assessment is treated as governance. However architecture assessment is very much a design process. This lesson covers ATAM and PBAAM, two architecture assessment methods which are useful in designing and building better systems shaped towards both structure and requirements.
Lesson 13
Roles and Agility
This lesson focuses on three majore components of becoming a great architect. Understanding the competencies of an architect. How to employ those competencies to roles in architecture. How to apply architecture to agile contexts.
Lesson 14
Stakeholder Driven Approach
One of the most critical functions of an architect is dealing with stakeholders and expectations. The stakeholder driven approach in the BTABoK provides a huge benefit in managing and succeeding in complex business ecosystems. And this lesson gives you a deep toolset for stakeholder success.
Lesson 15
Architecture Deliverables
Beyond a project there are dozens of expected deliverables from architects. These include types of business and technical evaluations and shared assets, governance, research in to new technologies and much more. These deliverables are as much a part of an architecture practice as project or program work.
Lesson 16
World Class Engagement
How can you build a world class architecture practice? How do you take the techniques learned in Core, the BTABoK and other Iasa assets and utilize them to the best advantage of the architects in your organization and your clients outcomes? This lesson dives into taking all of these techniques and applying them the day you get back to the job!
Teaching Modalities
- 5 days
- 4 lessons per day
- Full time
- 45 min presentation
- 45 min workshops with. group
- Classroom
- Classwork – Miro
- Course Material – MS Teams
- 9 weeks
- 4 hrs per week plus homework Total 6 hrs/wk
- 45 min lessons
- 1 hr group work
- Homework
- Final presentation to instructor for grade
- Online (Teams)
- Homework – Miro
- Course Material – MS Teams
- 10 weeks
- 2 hrs Online Self-Paced
- 2 hrs Homework
- 2 hrs Mentor meeting to review homework
- Final presentation to mentor for grade
- Online Instructor Reviewed
- Homework
- Homework – Miro
- Course Material – Chronus
Maintaining your IASA certification
Earning your IASA certification is a big achievement—we’re here to help you maintain it. Continuous skill growth that extends beyond certification is critical to fueling your career and your impact. IASA certification holders need to earn
- Learning
- Teaching others
- Presenting
- Reading
- Volunteering
- Content creating
