How Recoverable is your EA Practice
About 6 months ago I was having a conversation with an EA about their journey. They had recently moved into a new role and we were discussing their challenges. The main challenge, that I hadn’t quite anticipated was their ability and time to actually do EA work.
This organisation had previously established EA practices, and like many orgs in NZ they had gone through waves of seeing the value of enterprise architecture. They were at the time in an upswing, where the HoA had managed to sell the vision of an enterprise practice.
However, what transpired is that this org hadn’t accounted for any EA time. The architects in the organisation were meant to be 100% recoverable, regardless of if they were contract or perm. This isn’t itself unusual when discussing an SA practice but when it comes to EA it’s generally understood that you need to spend time thinking about the overall organisation rather than just on projects. This caused me to think about this in a broader sense and to ask the question to my HoA connections:
“how recoverable is your EA practice”
Over the last few months, I have spoken to about a dozen architecture leaders and asked the above question. I have got a variety of responses from 90% all the way down to 0%.
For those leaders who have teams closer to the 90% range there is a general understanding that it should be lower. There's a real danger of the EA practice getting too wrapped up in projects, possibly losing sight of the bigger organisational picture that EA is supposed to cover. It really highlights the need to handle recoverability rates.
Interestingly there has also been a concern from those who have the higher rates to drop down too low, the feeling that if your EA team is 0-20% recoverable they might end up becoming an “ivory tower” practice and be perceived as detached and isolated from the practicalities of the organisation. EA practices with extremely low recoverability rates (0-20%) face the risk of falling into this trap.
As with anything in the architecture space there isn’t a silver bullet, it’s about doing what works for your org. The challenge for most is trying to enact change and move from a higher rate to the lower. To me if the EA practice is getting towards 90% recoverable that can be a real indication that the business doesn’t necessarily understand the value of EA. I think that is probably a conversation for a different day.
I’d be interested to hear what others think is the best % for recoverability for architecture practices.