Checklist for the first 90 days of an Enterprise/Solution Architecture engagement.

1. ARCHITECTURE FIRST 90 DAYS
1. FIRST DAY
☐ Get into the building and sort out email
☐ Find our who you need to connect with
☐ Engage with fellow architects
☐ Buy coffees
2. FIRST WEEK
☐ Examine brand and products
☐ Reasons for architecture
☐ What frameworks are being used
☐ How is ops running
☐ What is the budget for change
☐ Establish the appetite for change
☐ Establish the capacity for change
☐ Learn about the business: drivers and differentiators
☐ Strategies and objectives
☐ Company structure
☐ Build a list of people to meet with
☐ Who are the influencers?
☐ Listen
☐ Get someone to whiteboard it for you
☐ Build alliances
☐ Meet stakeholders – what do they want
☐ Begin diagramming
☐ Establish a common language
☐ Reflect
☐ Earn the right to give opinions
☐ Ask “why”
3. FIRST FORTNIGHT
☐ Stakeholder relationships
☐ Stakeholder workflow
☐ Business pain points
☐ Potted history and failures
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2. Page 2
☐ Do something useful
☐ Build trust
☐ Core business propositions
☐ Understand which events/ceremonies matter
☐ Align to strategy
☐ Make reflections, not judgments
4. FIRST MONTH
☐ Systems/strategy alignment
☐ Agree the way of doing architecture
☐ Set some direction
☐ Understand business/domain scope
☐ Understand the culture and capacity for change
☐ Build stakeholder relationships
☐ Organisational maturity assessment
☐ Make plans – break the big tasks up into modules
☐ Operational processes
☐ Fact-based conversations
5. FIRST 90 DAYS
☐ Opportunities backlog
☐ Get familiar with, and earn trust from teams
☐ Asset landscape
☐ Asset lifecycle model
CC BY 4.0 2018 Produced with the assistance of the Enterprise & Solution Architecture AKL Meetup Group
https://www.meetup.com/Enterprise-Solution-Architecture-AKL/