Guide-Through Process for EA and ITSM

To adopt open standards and best practices for business transformation often involves significant investment of resources such as trainings, certified professionals, and huge amount of references and etc. Even well trained staff and personnel find it hard to memorize all the steps and procedures for developing and managing an enterprise architecture or ITSM infinitive development. It is quite necessary for them to refer back to manuals and references from time to time to locate the information they look for, which is extremely time consuming.

Visual Paradigm's Guide-through Process is designed to deal with this problem. Currently Visual Paradigm offers two guide-through processes:

1. TOGAF^® Architecture Development Method (ADM)
2. Project Management with 4-levels of Project Complexity

Each of the two processes is broken down into several development phases. Each phase consists of a number of steps which embedded with instructions and samples, guiding you to perform the activities required in enterprise architecture development and IT project management, and producing the process deliverables needed. These works include analysis, visual modelling with diagrams like ArchiMate 3 Diagram, and to develop summary based on the findings. All these steps are inter-connected from one step to another. The transcription of information will be done automatically by the system. The system will also transfer your previous deliverable or work to subsequent steps as references, or transcribe the data to the next step for further actions or resolution to be taken. You only need to follow the step-by-step instructions, samples to complete the entire process without worrying how to do this and that, and what is supposed to be done next. Furthermore, the Project Progress Indicator will show you where you are by marking those steps that you had completed. You only need to do some analysis, modeling, or filling-in some data in a table and then the system will compose a set of nice-formatted deliverables for you. All the deliverable will be archived in the visual File Cabinet for further references.

The benefits of the Guide-through Process Approach

1. Structure process into phases, activities and steps and embedded with instructions, samples and input references.
2. Progress Indicator that shows where you are and the status of completion for phases, activities and steps.
3. Perform analysis, diagramming and work incrementally and generate deliverable and report automatically.
4. Auto transcribe data from one step to another for further actions or to perform different forms of analysis.
5. Carry forward of deliverable as input reference from one step to another.
6. Assign activities or deliverables as tasks for different team members, through taking advantage of the built-in task manager (Tasifier).
7. Seamlessly integrate EA or Project Management process with Agile software development process and toolset.

Do it collaboratively in Team

Typically, an EA or Project Management initiative involve many teams, people, activities and resources such as meetings, information gathering, form filling, and deliverables and report development, together with the time frames and communication establishment. The guide-through process will take care of all those aspects above for your team. You can assign who is responsible for what for each activity, or deliverables and furthermore you can also detail the role into RACI level (Responsible / Accountable / Consult / Inform) by automatically generating a PERT chart from the process. You can touch up those information such as time duration, task dependency and RACI all in one place (PERT). The Pert Chart will automatically send those information to the Task Manager and the rest of the jobs will be handled by the Task Manager, including stakeholder management & notification, task assignment, deadline and etc.

Examples and Screenshots for EA and PM Guide-through