Challenges and Solutions in SOA Transformation Projects

Hakan KURTULUSconatusoft.com

• Short-term expectations• Mind-set change of IT and business people• Not mature IT platform• Organizational challenges• Lack of technical knowledge

SOA Challenges

In most of the projects which runs under the aggressive deadlines, such as the most financial projects, it is not easy to manage all transformation projects which were started at the same time. And management wants to see the results as soon as possible. • Changing IT’s project management approach from traditional

Waterfall methods to more Agile ways, you may have a chance to be succeeded in increasing transparency so that business and unit managers could see the results frequently

• You as a technical team leader or as a product owner, must define the business cases clearly so that solutions could be done in more expectable time. If you have acceptable reasons, others usually tend to be empathize your time schedule.

• Motivating the business to think long term and strategic via demonstrating some success stories is the crucial point in transformation projects.

Short-term expectations

The problem is not technology. People and processes are at the heart of what’s wrong with big transformation projects as it may currently exist in the enterprise.• You need to put forward team play instead of one-man show. To

do that you must run the SDLC processes from analysts to developers to produce mature outputs so that everyone could do their jobs efficiently. Better yet, you must try to apply some Agile rules to make results more transparent.

• In spite of mastering their own subjects, people were not pumped up sufficiently seeing the big picture. So emphasizing where you are going to on all occasions is another crucial point.

• SOA approach needs heterogeneous teams to work closely. You often need to translate the business language into the technical one and vice versa.

Mindset change of IT and business people

Successful SOA adoption requires that the organization reaches a level of maturity in a number of important respects that include technical readiness, alignment of organizational business processes and services, and the definition of the SOA governance model. • Starting small, but keeping the momentum going. Little by little the

architecture will get better if you just keep moving the ball forward• SOA based projects need service-oriented approach rather than

application specific attitude of mind. Working with SMEs and technical leaders in order to split those application logic into small and self-contained services you were able to increase IT’s capabilities to adopt to consumer-provider based approach.

• Business Process Modeling (BPM) and Object- Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) are well established techniques that have been applied to SOA. Providing technical teams to be trained for these technologies step by step and also informing business units how important to think top-down instead of bottom-up simplifies your job.

Not mature IT platform

When those projects come down to actually changing systems that are part of someone’s job security, that’s when things get hard. Collaboration of teams is the main target that the enterprise must reach. • Those who need to drive the systemic change that big transformation

projects require should be empowered, typically, with the authority to do something. Otherwise, you’re in endless meetings with people who have agendas that don’t include rebuilding the architecture for agility and reuse

• People who are responsible for legacy systems should be convinced and fired in order to drive change at the speed it needs to be driven. Because they would play a key role in future iterations of the program because they generally know the business rules

• SOA projects mostly need integration related tasks. Teams should necessarily be organized to make something together in a collaborative environment. Thus, people belong to the different domains can come together and discuss the integration issues regularly. These meeting increased the motivation and co-working capabilities. You can also add some additional collaboration tools to the system.

Organizational challenges

Big transformation projects may force teams to have a comprehensive knowledge of the new technological terminologies• Business teams need to be mentored to model the business

processes in compliance with business capability maps and tools (such as IBM Business Modeler, etc.) requirements. Learning such tools can be beneficial before the transformation program started.

• You generally need to think top-down approach and contract-first methodology. Bottom-up techniques make you waste some time. Having said that, business drives first in big transformation projects and they need to be seen the big picture during the project life-cycle.

• As integration service bus in the middle of the SOA environment means the backbone, applying SOA best practices while implementing services is another crucial point.

Lack of technical knowledge

• An architectural based approach such as TOGAF• An appropriate project management methodology such as

Scrum• Supporting organizational structure• Strategic approach, focusing on alignment with business goals • SOA governance • Realistic context-based technology evaluations • Change of mindset-a different development and

implementation approach

The key ingredients for huge SOA based transformation projects success are: