Togaf vs PMP vs ITIL vs Six Sigma

25 July 2016
16:52

A colleague of mine had recently attended a training on TOGAF. He started relating it with the architectural practices in ou r organization and his previous organizations.
During the course he asked the trainer in which organizations can this be used. Naturally the trainer said that it can be use d in any industry and most organizations can
use this.
To complicate things further my good friend had also attended a Six Sigma training and the trainer who by now has been wearin g thick Six Sigma glasses for few years
and said it can be used in any industry and in any organization . On top of that, during the discussion on DFSS(Design For Si x Sigma) my friend got an impression that it can
be used for application development.
To thicken the confusion, a PMP colleague had said that many techniques used in Six Sigma like Fish Bone diagram, Pareto char t are used in project management also.
That got my friend so confused that he started thinking all these systems are almost same and can be used based on organizati onal or individual choice.
Hi Champ, coffee?
Hello HeMan .. Why not? Let's go to the cafeteria. By the way, how are your explorations in IT frameworks and techniques goi ng on ?

I am good, Thank you . By the way, I am still a Layman in my explorations and far from becoming a HeMan.
That's a good one Bro. what is that confused look on your face? Unable to pick your coffee?

Ha ha. You are right, I am confused in selection, but not coffee. Let's sit there and talk.
O ic. If it isn't coffee selection that's troubling you, What is it?
I am attending TOGAF training now, which as you know is used for Enterprise Architecture. I also attended a training in Six S igma recently. My Six Sigma trainer said that it
can be used in any industry and in any organization. He said that we can use it even for application development during the discussion on DFSS(Design For Six Sigma).
On top of that, I also found that lot of tools like Fishbone diagram and Pareto chart are used in both.
And another participant in the training said that some of these techniques are applied in Project management also.
Now, all these discussions confused me thoroughly. Is it that we can use any of these frameworks or methodologies for IT arch itecture, design or management?
Which one should we start with first and in which order should we use them?
Interesting observations. I believe each of them are best suited for a specific phase of the IT life cycle. Techniques like P areto analysis are statistical tools that have a very
wide area of application. They shouldn't be used to assess the capabilities of frameworks.

I will keep the discussion at layman level for easy understanding. So, please don't hold me for not being very accurate with the terminology.
To understand the application of these frameworks, let us start at the beginning..
It is almost unimaginable now a days to think of large & medium enterprise to be working without IT. The information flow acr oss planning, production, order logging,
delivery, invoicing and various is IT based. Many a times interactions with suppliers and customers also are done through sy stems .
World has moved away from in-house application development covering all the aspects of business transactions to COTS(Commercial Off the shelf) software. S o any
organization starting afresh will need to select a set of software products for their business functions. Either different so ftware products or different modules of the same
software suite will be used for performing various business functions in the organization. They have to be integrated well t o facilitate smooth business transactions of
the enterprise. They certainly need a framework for deciding what applications they need to have for their business processes . That framework will help in design the data
flow among various modules. Beyond these, there are many more aspects to be considered, which are covered in Enterprise Archi tecture. TOGAF is a framework for
defining the Enterprise Architecture.

You said that the trainer mentioned that Six Sigma can be used for application development. It's natural for a person with de ep expertise in a framework to develop love
for that framework and start seeing the world through that lens. They believe that it can be used in many other areas also.
So, is TOGAF only for new organizations?
No, no.
Technology has been changing fast and at some point of time it makes lot of sense to embrace new technology for organizations . The interdependencies of application
software on a specific operating system version and that requiring a recent hardware and even the inability of some new appli cations to communicate with legacy
applications may call for modernizing the application landscape of an organization.
There are a variety of new software specializing in specific functionality like CRM, Payroll and Analytics etc, which give so me great capabilities to organizations. So, many
organizations are modernizing their application landscape to include these new applications. Enterprise Architecture framewor ks such as TOGAF is used to ensure that the
new application or software integrates well with the current enterprise application landscape and is able to deliver real bus iness value.
Now that we have clouds everywhere, can I kiss goodbye to TOGAF?
Unfortunately No.
In fact, the relevance of Enterprise Architecture like TOGAF increases further with the availability of application services choices, right from in-house applications all the
way to SaaS(Software As A Service). That is easily understandable; while each of these services cover their core functionali ty well, the onus of getting all such applications
to work together and deliver business value lies with the Enterprise Architecture team of that organization. They need a sol id framework for that.

OK. Got it, now that TOGAF had helped me to architect my enterprise application landscape, what is my next weapon?
Once the architecture and deployment design are finalized, Project management is used to orchestrate various activities acros s the different teams involved in completing
the implementation.
Typical activities in the project include:
Detailed planning for the project,
Procurement of software,
Development/customization of the application to suit the organization's requirements,
Procuring and installing the hardware(servers, storage, networking) , operating system, databases, application servers and we b servers etc
Implementing common IT systems like mailing, collaboration systems, anti virus systems
Implementing IT management systems
End to end testing the new applications
Release to end users
Initial deployment support

writing Page 1

 Initial deployment support

Etc
Please bear in mind that the above list is just indicative and is not exhaustive.
If the deployment involves multiple related projects, then program management is used.
Do I always use project management for new deployments only?
That's a good question. Project management's applicability is not limited to new deployments. It can be used in different sta ges of IT life cycle. In fact we see project
management happening in all stages one way or the other. In the initial stages, it is used for development and testing and la ter for deployment and subsequently for
improvement projects and they will eventually be used for decommissioning. In short project management is used for any endea vour with a specific start and end states
and which are not of routine nature.
Feeling better now , but now that we have covered setup or modernize part of my enterprise application landscape, do I still need ITIL?
Yes, my friend.
Now that we have a set of applications running to carryout enterprise transactions, we need to ensure that they continue to d o so, isn't it?
We can do so by monitoring their availability to start with. What we do once we find an abnormality becomes event management. And when something impacting
functionality, it becomes an incident and the way of handling these is incident management. Starting from these, there are a range of aspects of the IT service that we
need to manage to ensure the optimum functioning of the applications and their underlying hardware, like availability manage ment, change management, capacity
management, problem management, service level management etc. ITIL(Information Technology Information Library) is a set of g uidelines for managing the Information
Technology and provides a framework for doing the same.
Got it and I am just left with only Six Sigma now. When do I use it?
While the focus is initially on getting the functionality right and having a working system in place, over time we look at op timizing the system for efficiencies. Six Sigma
provides excellent methodology of managing the service improvements. The objective here is to measure current efficiency and identify areas that provide major benefit
when improved. Different statistical techniques are used for measuring current efficiency. We use data from IT Service mana gement system ( built on ITIL guidelines) for
the analysis. we may briefly revisit the enterprise architecture to see if it needs revision or updation. We use project mana gement to carry out the improvements.

Thanks Bro. Now I understand which wheel(tool) fits where in the IT Application life cycle.
Let me summarize what I understood.
If I have to setup IT applications for my enterprise or make significant changes in my application landscape, I will use an Enterprise Architecture framework.
We will then spawn one or more projects for implementation, at the end of which we will have a suite of business applications to run our business activities.
We will use a IT Service Management framework for setting up the management of our IT estate and start using it to ensure tha t IT services are available according to
SLAs and performing optimally.
We will use a Quality framework like Six Sigma to measure our quality, identify opportunities for improving it further and im plement the same.
I am glad that you are able to map the appropriate framework for each phase of the life cycle. While we perceive them as dis tinct phases, in actual practice you may see a
bit of overlapping or one framework initiating the other etc. don't let that confuse you. I suppose your next adventure will be to select a framework from the alternatives
available in each phase. All the best.

writing Page 2