Amalgamated Diagrams

The Enterprise Unified ProcessTM (EUP) is comprehensive. Over the past few years I’ve learned as I’ve tried to teach people about the EUP is that they often don’t want the details presented by the various workflow diagrams which we developed for the EUP book. Instead they want one, albeit detailed, diagram overviewing all of the activities of a given discipline. So I thought about this a bit and came up with the idea of amalgamated workflow diagrams. Figure 1 presents an amalgamated workflow diagram for the
Enterprise Architecture discipline. It is the combination of the workflow activity diagram of Figure 2 and the workflow details diagrams of Figure 3, Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 6, and Figure 7. The amalgamated workflow diagram has several characteristics:

  1. It presents a good overview of the discipline. The diagram capture the critical aspects of the detailed workflow diagrams — the roles, activities, and artifacts — but doesn’t show the interfaces with other disciplines.
  2. It avoids the potentially serial nature of the workflow activity diagram. Although Figure 2 isn’t so bad, many people often make the mistake of wanting to follow the activities of a discipline in serial order when in fact they should be performed iteratively.
  3. It doesn’t preclude the other diagrams. It is perfectly fine to show the workflow details diagrams when needed. In many ways, the amalgamated diagram of Figure 1 is a suitable replacement for Figure 2.

Figure 1. The amalgamated workflow diagram for the Enterprise Architecture discipline.

Figure 2. The Enterprise Architecture workflow.

Figure 3. The Define Architectural Requirements workflow details.

Figure 4. The Define Candidate Architecture workflow details.

Figure 5. The Refine Enterprise Architecture workflow details.

Figure 6. The Define Reference Architecture workflow details.

Figure 7. The Support Project Teamsworkflow details.