Splitting Projects with EA

[thomaskilian]

Hi there,
I wonder if anyone has experience in splitting up projects when working with EA?

Currently I'm working on the introduction of Navision as "Business Platform" for my company. Recently only the financials part has been used and the requirements were quite clear. But now it has been decided to use this tool also for CRM. The implication is that three new departments (marketing, sales, call center) get involved in the project. Business objects are shared between all of them but the objectives of the departements differ. My question is now: should I start three different EA projects or should I place everything in one? Taking the first path would lead me to clearly separated visions for each department, not getting confused with irrelevant things, but with the disadvantage of having the same business objects in multiple models. The second path vice versa.

What is your opinion?

Cheers, Thomas

[Oscar]

Thomas,

If I were in your position I would try to quantisize/categorize the different aspects to base my decision upon.

Something like:
Department A
- common objectives with 1 or more depts.  : 1 - 5  (or low)
- unique objectives : 10 - 15 (or medium)
- dept. emplyees are focused on : own dept.
- iiritation by other depts. objectives : high

Department B
- common objectives with 1 or more depts.  : 10 - 15  (or medium)
- unique objectives : 5 - 8 (or low)
- dept. emplyees are focused on : own + other dept.
- iiritation by other depts. objectives : low

The list of aspects not limited to these ofcourse.



For a previous project, not using EA, we used an combination.
The business model for all the departments was in one 'general project'.
For each department we then used a view on this general project to specify the department specific stuff.

Changes in the general project and subsequently in the views, due to changes/requirements for one specific department, caused us considerable (manual) work.
So I would bias my choise, still depending on the aspects mentioned above, to a one project solution.

Oscar

[thomaskilian]

Hi Oscar,
thanks for the reply. Can you tell me how you managed the splitting of "general view" and "detailed view"? Did you use different EA-projects or did you use any EA-technique?

Cheers, Thomas

[Oscar]

Thomas,

No, we did not use Enterprise Architect (it was in our pre EA era).

We had different 'projects' for the general model and for the department views.
There was a limited share functionality between the different 'projects' to create the views in the 'department projects'.

If we had used EA it would have been different projects.  

A main reason for using different projects was the poor (and stable) multi-user functionality.


For a comparable new project using EA I would choose a one project approach with separate packages for the general model and the departments.

Oscar

[thomaskilian]

Thanks Oscar,
I'll try the package approach  

Cheers, Thomas