In 2023 Konvergent was asked to support one of the Tier 1 Global Management Consulting firms in the remodelling of their 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The Global Head of Architecture had recently joined and realised very quickly that the architecture department was outdated, operating in silos and very disconnected from the business.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 an more agile way and were perfectly positioned to look at this problem.
During the discovery process, and after interviewing 15 key stakeholders across architecture, IT and business customers (stakeholders), we found the following issues to be prevalent:
Governance. Some teams were trying to operate in an agile way, more aligned to the new structure that the organisation had been modelled on, but others were still more aligned to the traditional waterfall approach. There was no consistency on how architectural designs were taken and in fact approved, leading to high levels of frustration and inconsistent outcomes.
Geographical Coordination. With members of the architecture teams sitting on 4 different continents, the issues surrounding communication were stark.
Tooling. Their main architecture tool LeanIX had been logged onto by three people in the last 12 months for £90,000 per annum. As there was no tool in consistent use, there was also no common taxonomy of language, which we found to have led to the duplication of projects that ultimately had the same aims and objectives.
A strong desire to move to the SAFe methodology. This was something that the engineering teams and business leaders were pushing for. However, this was something that Konvergent advised against, as whilst SAFe isn’t intrinsically bad, it is incredibly complicated with many moving parts, which require experienced practitioners and an established programme infrastructure, and we did not feel the company had the knowledge, especially in architecture, to make this work.
Discipline bigotry. This is a term coined by Konvergent advisor Dr Christine Stephenson, and it soon became apparent that it was in use here. Agile, by its general nature, is considered an IT terminology. Enterprise Architecture is business-focused, so by putting the term agile next to architecture, it was instantly considered that it was software architecture that was being developed.
Lack of Transformation Roadmap. There was no roadmap that could be communicated to the whole of the function, or at individual levels beyond very detailed project plans. As a result there was a lack of understanding of the overall direction and impact of what the company was doing.
Recommended and helped implement a hybrid approach. 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. 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.
To tackle the geographical coordination challenges, we advised on the establishement ‘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.
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. By trying to get the architecture team 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, non-functional 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 PowerPoint deck accessible on the company intranet.
Other than the immediate cancellation of the £90,000 LeanIX contract, some of the other results took longer to bear immediate fruit. However, 12 months later, one of the key pieces of information has been the 50% reduction in misaligned and duplicated initiatives brought about by far better communication across the company. The architecture function has evolved from being seen as a blocker to being recognised as a strategic enabler, with architecture engagement scores increasing from 15% to 65% across business units. Time-to-market for new initiatives has been reduced by 23%, demonstrating the value of having architects embedded within delivery teams rather than operating as a separate approval function. Perhaps most importantly, the cultural shift has been profound – architects are now sought out as collaborative partners rather than avoided as governance gatekeepers, creating a sustainable foundation for continuous improvement and adaptation.
