Neetu PunwaniAVP Deutsche bank| Deutsche BankHillsborough, Nc, United States
This is available on the preparatory test :" While role describes the business case, problem or scenario that requires a technical or service solution" , Choices are : Team Lead, Product Owner, Team Member, Architect Owner, Stakeholder. Appreciate response on why you think a role has the knowledge and the reporting channel to have that information. Saving Changes...
Really appreciate the responses in line with the role's job responsibility, however when we refer to the question, there are few context related facts to be taken into consideration : The question is written as a form of exchange of information between parties, what comes to your attention when you read the following : "While role describes the business case, problem or scenario that requires a technical or service solution" : What do you think is the context here.. the other party is the team or a peer or some Portfolio member and notice the problem can be technical or service solution.
If the situation only referred to technical debt / issue, then AO is definitely the first person to know about the issue and raise it for awareness to say PO to include it in the sprint.
However, I have rarely seen AO writing business case or haven't come across any Architecture training that shares knowledge on how to evaluate and write the many aspects of Business case, such as customers impacted or impact to sales and other divisions which requires a holistic impact assessment which POs are trained to work on.
The focus in the question is "which role describes the business scenario or problem...", it is not asking for which role has the solution for business scenario or problem ... which requires strategic technological stack solutioning.
Appreciate thoughts.
The term "describes the business scenario or problem", simply means to write it down formally. A formal system architecture is described in multiple separate views including the problem statement, conceptual solution, and technical views of the solution such as the logical, functional, and physical architectures along with requirements.
Architectures also include qualities often referred to as "illities" such as sustainability, produceability, profitability, and affordability. These are the critical qualities which make a good solution. When trading illities such as customer cost to technical performance, those are strategic considerations that may shape the product outcome.
Business cases may be created at multiple levels. The architecture level business case is a strategic rationale such as: The product must be affordable to the customer or it won't sell and profitable to the performing organization or it doesn't make sense. A description of a problem such as "We need a product that does X and that costs less than $5M in order to be a viable business venture." describes the problem to address as per the test question. The detail level business case of how the product meets the business targets is not a description of the problem, but rather the analysis that the product as defined fits the business case/problem statement. Saving Changes...
I'd say the way the AO role is structured from DAD (where it originated) was focused on the technical architecture (the "how") whereas I'd definitely see the PO as working with business architects to incorporate an understanding of existing capabilities and associated roadmaps.
As far as the question goes, I think it is a bit too ambiguous to pass muster via any rigorous psychometric testing process as there'd be too many votes for the PO role.
Kiron
I think people are over-complicating the question, which is possibly the intent of the chosen wording. Test writers do that a lot.
If the question was written as, "Who defines the fundamental reason for why a solution is needed in the first place." it would probably seem clear that is architecture. By using the term business case as one kind of rationale, people's minds go to the detail level as a PM or PO would create for justifying their solution because that is what they are accustomed to doing. That's not what it asks though.
I think it is quite clear when you break down the question into it's components. The subject is "role". The predicate is really "describes the reason why a solution is necessary"; "Business case, problem or scenario that requires a technical or service solution", is merely decomposing the need into different potential types or rationale. It's not asking who does the financial analysis of the chosen solution path.
The AO answer is completely in agreement with definitions I find from PMI. It may refer to DAD usage, but that came from IBM who is full of people well versed in they difference between system design, and architecture, and the different perspectives of an architecture. They're also not diverging from the definition of architecture consistent with other widely applicable BoKs.
Certainly the AO is more involved in what you refer to as the "technical architecture", because it's generally a lot more work to describe the system under design, then it is to describe the need for a system. The definition of architecture though is "fundamental concepts or properties of a system in its environment embodied in its elements, relationships, and in the principles of its design and evolution (ISO/IEC/IEEE 2015, Section 4.5)" A business case describes how the product aligns with the business environment. Without that, a cost driven product is a solution without a problem. Saving Changes...
Stéphane ParentSelf Employed / Semi-retired| Leader MakerPrince Edward Island, Canada
I read the question the same way as Keith. The product owner owns the product. The architect owner owns the situation that will need products. Saving Changes...
