Applied Business Architecture

Day one equips participants with foundational knowledge and practical frameworks, setting a strong base for advanced applications in business architecture over the course’s next phases.

Participants are introduced to the course structure, objectives, and expectations. This session establishes a collaborative learning environment, ensuring participants are comfortable and aligned with the course’s practical, hands-on approach. It sets the stage for active participation and engagement throughout the program.

Explore the evolving role of business architects in driving organisational transformation and competitive differentiation. Participants learn about key meta-skills like systems thinking, ambiguity tolerance, and human-centred approaches essential for navigating modern business complexities. This foundation is critical for understanding how architects deliver value in dynamic environments.

Gain a clear understanding of what business architecture entails and its application using globally recognised frameworks such as TOGAF® and BABOK®. Participants are introduced to holistic, multi-dimensional views of organisational capabilities, value delivery, and structures. This session underscores the discipline’s role in enabling agility, innovation, and effective transformation strategies.

Participants are introduced to the course’s central case study, which mirrors real-world challenges faced by organisations. The scenario highlights the need for agility, differentiation, and strategic focus in a competitive landscape. This case serves as a practical anchor, ensuring participants can directly apply the concepts and techniques they learn.

Learn techniques for identifying and addressing stakeholder concerns, ensuring alignment between business goals and architectural initiatives. This session emphasises collaborative engagement, helping participants foster trust and gain insights essential for successful project outcomes. It builds confidence in handling diverse perspectives and priorities.

Discover how to articulate and evaluate an organisation’s value creation and delivery through business models. Using the Business Model Canvas, participants visualise existing operations and identify opportunities for innovation. This session sharpens analytical and strategic planning skills, enabling participants to design impactful business models.

Delve into the Business Motivation Model (BMM) and its role in linking drivers, strategies, goals, and tactics. This session enables participants to document and analyse strategic contexts systematically, facilitating better alignment between business objectives and execution plans. By mastering these tools, participants are equipped to create actionable, strategic roadmaps for their organisations.

Day two empowers participants with a deeper understanding of value creation and capability alignment, preparing them to lead strategic initiatives that deliver measurable business outcomes.

Dive into the concept of value systems, including value disciplines, chains, streams, and networks. Participants explore how to define and analyse the value exchange between organisations and stakeholders, using frameworks like Porter’s Value Chain and Value Stream Mapping. This session equips participants to identify, align, and optimise value-adding activities, ensuring their organisations deliver stakeholder-centric solutions effectively and efficiently.

Learn how to structure strategic planning around core business capabilities. This session focuses on combining business-led and enterprise-wide perspectives to develop actionable strategies. Participants gain tools to enhance transparency, improve decision-making, and align capabilities with organisational objectives, ensuring readiness for agile and transformative projects.

Participants build a Business Capability Model, mapping what the organisation does to achieve its strategic goals. Through iterative stakeholder engagement, participants identify core and supporting capabilities, ensuring clarity and alignment across value chains. This session helps translate strategic plans into actionable execution models, enabling participants to lead impactful organisational change.

Discover how to view business operations through the lens of customer value. Using tools like the Value Proposition Canvas, participants learn to identify products and services that align with customer needs and preferences. This session strengthens the ability to create value-driven business strategies, ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Assess the maturity of organisational capabilities to determine their readiness to meet strategic goals. Participants learn to evaluate capabilities across people, processes, technology, and information dimensions, identifying gaps and prioritising improvements. This analysis enables informed decision-making and prepares organisations for incremental, significant, or transformational change.

Analyse operational and strategic challenges to identify inefficiencies, risks, and constraints. Participants uncover common organisational pain points and explore solutions to mitigate them, ensuring alignment with strategic priorities. This session enhances problem-solving skills and equips participants to drive meaningful improvements that support business objectives.

Day three provides participants with the tools and strategies needed to transition from planning to execution, ensuring their organisations can navigate complexity, harness opportunities, and achieve sustained success.

This session focuses on using projects as strategic tools, linking them to organisational goals through structured analysis. Participants learn to assess projects for alignment with strategy, resource constraints, and value delivery. This ensures efficient prioritisation and execution of initiatives that drive measurable outcomes.

Through frameworks like PESTLE, participants analyse external industry and market factors that impact organisational strategy. By understanding political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental dynamics, participants can better anticipate disruptions and align their strategies to changing market conditions.

Explore the implications of market and technological disruptions using Red Ocean and Blue Ocean strategies. Participants learn to identify threats, uncover new opportunities, and craft strategies that differentiate their organisations in a competitive landscape, balancing cost and value effectively.

This session covers methods to assess the strategic importance of business capabilities, focusing on those critical to achieving organisational goals. Participants gain insights into prioritising capabilities that require uplift and ensuring their efforts are aligned with strategic objectives, resulting in coherent, impactful initiatives.

Participants assess the maturity of business capabilities and their readiness to support future objectives. By applying overlays like strategic importance and maturity level, participants identify capability gaps, enabling them to plan for gradual or transformational improvements aligned with the organisation’s vision.

Learn to define and model a Target State Architecture that encapsulates the organisation’s future state across business, information, and technology layers. This blueprint serves as a foundation for planning and tracking progress, ensuring alignment with long-term strategic goals.

This session provides a step-by-step approach to creating a capability uplift roadmap. Participants identify priorities, align projects with strategic goals, and sequence initiatives for optimal impact. The roadmap ensures clarity and coherence in transitioning to a future-ready state.

Learn the art of presenting architectural findings to diverse audiences, from senior stakeholders to non-technical teams. This session emphasises clarity, storytelling, and the use of visual aids to communicate complex ideas effectively, ensuring buy-in and alignment across the organisation.

Explore contemporary frameworks and approaches, blending classic business architecture with design thinking and agile methodologies. Participants learn to adapt to emerging trends, ensuring their practices remain innovative and relevant in dynamic environments.

This final session ties together all concepts, focusing on the practical execution of business architecture through project portfolios and agile methodologies. Participants learn to manage initiatives dynamically, align funding and priorities with strategy, and enable enterprise agility, ensuring successful implementation of organisational goals.