Project Managers

There’s lots of really useful information in Enterprise Architect. Requirements and use cases. Architectural components and changes. Processes and stakeholders. Risks and Issues. The list goes on. Wouldn’t it be great if you could access that information too, and use it to make your job easier?

Stakeholder Management

Keep your stakeholders happy by giving them new insights and tailored deliverables. Keep the surprises to a minimum.

Stakeholders don’t care about how you do it – they just want better outputs. So what outputs can eaTeamWorks help to deliver?

The key thing that stakeholders need is relevant information. In a familiar form that they can understand. And with the minimum amount of friction.

Easily create and generate company standard deliverables for your milestone reviews from EA with eaDocX saved templates. Fonts, colors, branding, footnotes. eaDocX uses your standard Word templates and populates them with your EA content.

It’s also easy to create bespoke documents containing specific information that is relevant to just one stakeholder or stakeholder group. Create a single diagram, with just the elements specific to a particular issue that needs to be addressed today (we call this an ad-hoc diagram). And then simply print the diagram contents. It’s easy to tailor exactly how each element prints, so you can ignore the parts that are not relevant to the discussion.

Or, for stakeholders such as:

• owners of requirements or processes
• the support teams for elements of the to-be delivered solution
• sponsors
• product owners
• quality or security specialists
• PMs of dependent projects or programs

eaDocX lets you print a document structured using the connections in your model. So you can use this feature to print a document containing everything connected to any stakeholder. With the document profile saved then that bespoke report can be regenerated with up-to-date information whenever it’s needed. Just like any other generated document.

Maybe a spreadsheet is a better way to show the information they need? Open a spreadsheet view in eaSheets and filter and sort the contents to deliver whatever you need  your stakeholder to focus on. With eaSheets you can just look at the EA elements in a package with all their fields and TVs. Or you can open a Smart sheet to include all the related elements for each element too. Export the sheets to Excel and distribute them, for your stakeholders to collaborate on the contents. Then import their changes back into EA.

Milestone reporting

Using eaDocX your modelers can define the documents you need – for each of your key stakeholders – and regenerate them simply ready for any milestone. They can easily give you a document with just the subset of information you need when there’s an issue that needs urgent attention. And any updates can be quickly and easily saved back into the model with ea Revision Manager.

eaSheets gives you sorted and filtered spreadsheets of EA model data. So you can see and work with a compact list of just the risks, or just the requirements. Review the sprint backlog, or view the changes. Whatever you need, at any point in the project lifecycle. In the format that works for you.

Program management and inter-project dependencies

And your team can also let you know if there are project dependencies in the work that you are managing. When your team is modeling with Portfolio Manager, they can let you know which other projects are relying on yours, which projects have to deliver before you can go live, and if you need to change your project scope to reduce the delivery risks.

Stakeholders are often involved in several projects, and are keen to understand if there are dependencies and/or clashes. Portfolio Manager provides you with the knowledge and impact assessments you need to support intelligent conversations with stakeholders. The information you need to resolve overlapping scope, clashing changes and other, previously unforeseen, issues.

Risk and Issue Management

When your solution is modeled in EA, it’s easy to spot the implications of potential problems using traceability views. And then to identify or design mitigations that can be implemented.

Capture risks and issues using the standard Risk and Issue Elements in EA, adding TVs if necessary to include all the parameters that your organization’s process requires. Connect them to the elements in your solution that will be impacted, and produce a simple document to share the likely impacts. Create and save an eaSheets Template as your Risk Register.

Change Management

Many (most?) projects now use an agile development methodology. But for those projects that can’t be developed in this way, projects with complex deliverables being produced over extended timescales, then changes to project scope often need to be managed too.

One way to do this is to create a Change request element and ask your modelers to connect elements to it that may be impacted. But to fully discover what the changes will be, then copies of all those elements and their connections should be taken, so that the alternative solution can be modeled. Then when the proposed change is approved, the changes need to be absorbed back into the model.

Portfolio Manager provides a structured, controlled way of managing these kinds of changes. It coordinates and manages changes when multiple projects are working in the same model, as well as individual changes within projects. And it provides visibility to stakeholders and other modelers, with impact assessments and notifications as each change or project moves through its lifecycle.

Feasibility Assessments / Trade Off studies

Using Smart Tags – included in eaSheets – modelers can evaluate and compare options in EA. Using arithmetic and other functions, combine the structure of your model with values in your elements . Calculate earliest or latest dates. Sum or average the power or cost of alternate solutions. And more.

Business Benefits

Every project will have been started with a set of business benefits in mind. To

• increase revenue or profits
• reduce costs
• speed up a process
• introduce a new product or service
• meet a regulatory requirement

The expected business benefits of your project can be captured in EA , and then used to determine prioritisation of requirements, or inform the criteria to asses trade-offs. And those same business benefits can be included and monitored using eaSheets, Smart Tags, documents and more.