Key takeaways
- The name captures the essence of the rule; it avoids technologies and vague words.
- The Rationale covers business benefits and precedence; the Implications cover requirements and impacts.
- Flagging a speculative impact is better than leaving it out.
- Five criteria: Understandable, Robust, Complete, Consistent, Stable.
- An effective set of principles is small, future-oriented, and backed by senior management.
Four parts, four distinct contents
The recommended template has a name, a statement, a rationale, and implications. Exam questions often play on confusing these parts, so you need to know where each piece of information goes.
- Name: the essence of the rule, easy to remember, with no technology platform or vague word
- Statement: the underlying rule, short and unambiguous
- Rationale: business benefits in business language, the link with other principles, and when one prevails over another
- Implications: what the principle requires from the business and IT (resources, costs, tasks), its impact, the answer to ‘how does this affect me?’
Wording pitfalls
TOGAF flags words that make a principle vague: ‘support’, ‘open’, ‘consider’, and even ‘avoid’. The word ‘manage(ment)’ calls for caution, and superfluous adjectives or adverbs should be removed. Naming a specific technology in the name or statement is another mistake, because the principle must outlive product choices.
In the Implications, do not oversimplify, trivialize, or judge the impact. Some implications may remain potential or even speculative impacts: it is better to flag them than to stay silent. Rationale and Implications are not decorative: they foster understanding and acceptance, and later serve to justify decisions taken in the principle’s name.
The ‘Primacy of Principles’ example illustrates all this: principles bind the whole enterprise; an initiative is checked before it starts, and a conflict is settled by changing the initiative, at the risk of delaying it.
Diagnosing a set with the five criteria
A good set rests on the organization’s beliefs and values, uses business language, stays small, looks to the future, and has senior management support. A poor set falls into disuse and makes standards look arbitrary. To diagnose, match each symptom to a criterion.
- Understandable: the intent is unclear, leading to unintended violations
- Robust: too vague to settle a complex case or ground an enforceable policy
- Complete: important situations are covered by no principle
- Consistent: following one principle forces you to betray the spirit of another
- Stable: no amendment process, or principles changed project by project
TERMS TO KNOW
The terms, in context.
- Statement
- The part that expresses the fundamental rule concisely and unambiguously.
- Rationale
- The part that justifies the principle by its business benefits and states its relationship to other principles.
- Implications
- The part that describes the requirements, costs, tasks, and impacts of adopting the principle.
- Amendment process
- A procedure defined after ratification to add, change, or retire principles; a condition of the Stable criterion.