Adapt & Enable

Some take aways from the 23rd BAEA Café with Chris Potts

Written by Filip Hendrickx | 15 May 2014

Always inspiring, a seminar by Chris Potts. So I was keen on joining this evening’s EA Café about linking enterprise architecture to enterprise investment. If you haven’t read his books or participated in one of his workshops, I strongly encourage you to do so. Here are some things and questions that stuck with me today.

  • Do you want to make your projects succesful, or your portfolio? If your portfolio is managed well, it gives you enough probability of success to ensure running a healthy business, yet allows for enough risk to prevent you from standing still.
  • You want everyone in your company to be executing your strategy and working on your enterprise architecture. It should be a pervasive capability.
  • Actual change is what agents of stability allow to happen. People seeking stability will look for predictability, while when managing change, you should be managing probability. They are very different things, and getting decision makers feel confident in managing probability is much harder.
  • It is difficult, if not impossible, to make project sponsors accountable for project success. You’ll get better results when you make them responsible.
  • It’s probably easier to do (investment) portfolio management when you remove the project names from your portfolio dashboard.
  • You should not only invest money, but also people, energy, culture, … in your (innovation) projects. Finance is only one element of investment.

There is much more, but I’ll leave that to you to discover. Feel free to share your thoughts!

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