Agile Architecture

Agile Architecture

Agile Architecture @ Scale

Welcome to the IASA Agile Architecture @ Scale COURSE!

Agile Architecture @ Scale (AA@S) develops the practice of growing teams of teams using agile practices and using architecture to help address difficulties in large agile implementations. Agility at scale permeates areas of the business that were untouched by team-based agile practices. For example, business strategy, portfolio management, budgeting, procurement, innovation, and enterprise demand management. In large complex environments, organizations struggle to manage the overall architecture and roadmap or tie the delivered customer value to the achievement of business objectives.

This course provides guidance on the role of architects and architecture in agile environments and teaches the role an architect plays in any scaled agile environment regardless of framework. It also provides guidance on organizational changes needed to shift to a digital enterprise using agile methodologies, and the company-wide tools the architect team must put in place for the company to remain competitive and support the distributed delivery and operation of products and value streams.

Competency Focus Areas

Who is this course for?

The IASA Agile Architecture course is for architects, managers, senior technical and delivery staff who wish to get a full life-cycle view of working and deliverable architectures within agile delivery frameworks. They are expected to have completed CITA-Foundation certification or the Iasa Core training course. Students of the class have included CTO’s, Senior Development teams, architects of all types, and business managers with technical skills.

Course Details
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What you'll learn

Where do architects fit in large organizations that introduce agile concepts? Many delivery teams that start using agile practices suggest the architect role and architecture have only slow velocity and increase friction, practicing architecture using antiquated, command-and-control methods.

In every business, there is a demand to achieve business objectives that is supplied by or through the limited people and resources skilled in delivery and operation of digital capability. What do architects do in an agile environment, at scale?

From Agile at Scale in the Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2018/05/agile-at-scale, the article suggests that “Leadership teams need to instill agile values throughout the entire enterprise.” Architects are the role that provides that glue across business lines and technical staff supporting those lines. SAFe, DAD, Nexus, SOS, and other frameworks and methodologies have emerged as organizations grapple with scaling agile. But they are tools in a toolkit. This course helps architects understand their role, how they engage, and what they need to do to make the jump to a digital enterprise using agile delivery and operation techniques successful.  

Lesson 1

Course Orientation

Provides a common vision and vocabulary for describing a digital enterprise, agile delivery, and architecture, and how the three interact.

Lesson 2

Digital Business

Discussion on the phenomena that is a digital-first business mindset and the terms used to describe a digital enterprise and product.

Lesson 3

Customer Thinking

Covers creating strategy based on customer value delivered and the alignment between customer value and achieving business objectives.

Lesson 4

Agile Architecture

Review the Iasa description and skill set of an architect, and introduce the BTABoK, Iasa’s toolkit for architects

Lesson 5

Agile Enterprise

Describes the major functions and interactions of an agile enterprise that is taking a digital-first approach or investing in new focus on digital products.

Lesson 6

Scaled Agile Methods

Introduces tools and techniques to maintain synchronization and collaboration across a complex organization with self-empowered and distributed teams.

Lesson 7

Agile Engagment Models

Details the interactions between architects, distributed product delivery teams, and supporting business function teams to maintain a cohesive yet empowered, collaborative working team model.

Lesson 8

Value Streams and Capabilities

Covers techniques to quantify and measure customer value and tie the value back to the organization’s journey to achieving measurable business objectives.  

Lesson 9

Agile Architect and the Team

Details approaches for creating a healthy tension between the architecture team and the product delivery teams and setting boundaries that clearly define swim lanes and responsibilities between the various stakeholders.

Lesson 10

Agile Architecture Processes

Covers tools and techniques the architecture team use to define and provide guidance that enable and frees delivery teams to move forward with maximize velocity, mitigating issues as new information is uncovered without losing the intent of the architecture.

Lesson 11

Agile Design

Focuses of gathering the information needed to align business objectives with customer value and providing the guidance to delivery teams that enable them to act on their own to deliver products and services while maintaining the business objective to customer value alignment.

Lesson 12

Principles and Guardrails

Focuses on automating the delivery pipeline to enforce corporate governance, quality attribute attainment, pattern usage, and security standards, as well as harvest as-built implementation diagrams and data models, and that information and integration information available across the enterprise.

Lesson 13

Business Automation

Covers the tools and techniques used to automate and remove friction from business process and enable efficient communications and support between supporting business functions.

Lesson 10

Team Automation

Covers the tools and techniques used to automate and remove friction from product definition, prioritization, delivery, and operation mechanisms product delivery teams use.

Lesson 11

Technology Patterns

Covers the patterns and styles needed to deliver digital products that have the required reliability and resilience required, with characteristics that enable evolutions that matches the speed of technology innovation..

Lesson 12

Integrations

Covers the human aspects of architecture, product delivery, microservices integration, and the communications, empathy, and human behavioral understanding needed to open and maintain communications across distributed teams.

Teaching Modalities

  • 5 days
  • 3 lessons per day
  • Full time
  • 45 min presentation
  • 45 min workshops with. group
  • Classroom
  • Classwork – Miro
  • Course Material – MS Teams
  • 10 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
  • 10-12 weeks
  • 2 hrs Online Self-Paced
  • 2 hrs Homework
  • 2 hrs Mentor meeting to review homework
  • Final presentation to mentor for grade

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