Enterprise Architecture Recruitment Case Study

The brief

Remodelling the architecture function

The Global Head of Architecture had recently joined and realised very quickly that the architecture department was outdated, operating in silos and very disconnected from the business. He was looking for assistance in helping align the teams to a newer way of working that was more agile and capability-centric.

He knew from being part of the Konvergent roundtable community that the company always tried to tackle architecture assignments in a more agile way and was perfectly positioned to look at this problem, and asked us to find one of our Enterprise Architecture Associates for a long-term project.

We needed to find someone who would be able to start fast and deliver on a job spec that was more like an SoW. Thankfully, Konvergent had recently completed a very similar search assignment and was able to recommend two people within the space of a week. The person selected went on to deliver the work below.

Our approach

What did we do?

It was clear very early on that a recommendation to a true agile way of working would have been a disastrous approach that nearly everyone would have rejected.

• Recommended and helped implement a hybrid approach. The hybrid model directly addressed the consistency problem by allowing teams already working in an agile way to continue their progress, whilst providing a structured path for waterfall teams to gradually adopt agile principles. Rather than forcing everyone into SAFe’s complex framework, we created a simpler balance between central control and local autonomy.
• Product Architects. To tackle the geographical coordination challenges, we advised on the establishment of ‘Product Architects’ – Solution Architects embedded within regional agile teams but with dotted-line relationships to the central function. This created natural communication bridges across the four continents. These architects met weekly in rotating time zones, ensuring no region was consistently disadvantaged.
• Guideline-Driven Autonomy. The hybrid model also helped overcome the discipline bigotry issue. By positioning the central EA function as consultants rather than governors, we shifted the perception from ‘IT agile’ to ‘business enablement’. Architecture decisions affecting shared resources were taken centrally, whilst business unit-specific solutions could be decided locally within agreed guidelines. This “Guideline-Driven Autonomy” meant teams could move at their own pace without creating the chaos of completely decentralised decision-making.
• Cultural change. True agile Enterprise Architecture is very scarce. However, we realised that many agile principles should be adopted to create a more collaborative team environment. We felt that the architects needed to be inclusive and spend more time listening to people talk rather than being the ones doing the talking, and to see things from their customers’ perspective first.
• Transformation roadmaps. One of the key deliverables of this work was a series of interlinked roadmaps that spoke to a specific user group, based around functional, end-user services and non-functional requirements, and aligned to the capability domains. This helped increase the level of engagement in architecture across the function by making documents that were previously locked inside a 250-slide PowerPoint deck accessible on the company intranet.