Amalgamated Workflow Diagrams

	Amalgamated Workflow Diagrams
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The Enterprise Unified Process^TM (EUP) is comprehensive. Over the past few years I've learned as I've tried to teach people about the EUP, and about the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Agile Unified Process (AUP) for that matter, 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:

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.
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.
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.
It is multi-purpose. I used amalgamated workflow diagrams when I put together the EUP Poster as well as the Agile Unified Process (AUP) product. In fact, I only used amalgamated workflow diagrams to describe the disciplines of the AUP.

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 Teams workflow details.

Recommended Resources

Recommended Reading

The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process by Scott W. Ambler, John Nalbone, and Michael Vizdos. Whereas the RUP defines a software development lifecycle, the EUP extends it to cover the entire information technology (IT) lifecycle. The extensions include two new phases, Production and Retirement, and several new disciplines: Operations and Support and the seven enterprise disciplines (Enterprise Business Modeling, Portfolio Management, Enterprise Architecture, Strategic Reuse, People Management, Enterprise Administration, and Software Process Improvement).