The Essential Project Forum

As many of you knows the TOGAF specification 9.2 was released earlier this year. Key enhancements made in this version include updates to the Business Architecture and the Content Metamodel introducing value streams and business capabilities.

One approach to model value streams in Essential is to use capability chains as commented in the below topic.
https://www.enterprise-architecture.org ... eam#p29318

As stated in the above topic there is no current view that uses the capability chain, and from my perspective it makes no sense to model capability chains since I cannot communicate these chains via views.

Is there any plans in future releases of Essential to extend the meta model with classes like Value Stream, Value Stage, Value Item and Value Proposition in addition to of course have views showing the mentioned instances of the classes?

Thanks and regards,
Dag

Hi Dag,

We are currently working on both meta-model extensions and additional views covering not only Value Streams, but also Customer Journeys. We are looking at linking Customer Journeys and Value Streams/Stages to existing classes such as Business Capabilities, Processes and Applications to understand the likely causes of issues etc. Our current thought is that we will keep this at a high level to understand impacts/issues and will not model down to Value Item, Value Proposition as we are not trying to replicate the work that detailed Value Mapping and Customer Journey tools do.

If you have any detailed requirements that could feed into the work it would be great if you could send over, we’re always keen to get as much real life experience as possible into the views.

Sarah

Hi,

As far as I can tell, in the metamodel, the only way to link Business capabilities to Value Streams, is indirectly via business processes. Is this correct?

I think it would be valuable to map the value stream, and /or a value stage to Business Capabilities that support the value stream.
Are there any plans to do so?

We have 2 value chains (ref: Porter) for our organisation . I guess these can be thought of as the highest level value streams. We already manually draw the associations between the value chain stages and the business capabilities.
We are also developing lower level value streams... useful to associate these with business capabilities and business processes.

Any advice?

ta
Karen

Hi Karen/Dag,

we agree that it should be possible to relate Value Chains more directly to Business Capabilities. More specifically, we believe that it should be possible to describe the Business Capabilities that are required for a given Value Stage of a Value Stream. Therefore, in the next version of the meta-model (6.11) we will add a new slot to the Value_Stage meta-class, which we will be calling vsg_required_business_capabilities (multiple cardinality, with allowed class of Business_Capability).

If you cannot wait for the next release, feel free to add the new slot manually but please be sure to use the slot name exactly as above to be consistent with the future release update pack.

Thanks,

Jason

@Jason

Sounds good -

Will 6.11 also update the value stream view so that the capabaility name(s) will show appropriately ?

Chris

@Chris,

yer, we will update the Value Stream view to incorporate the new relationship between Value Stages and Business Capabilities.

Thanks,

Jason