Best Practices: Architecture Review

Enterprise architecture (EA) professionals must achieve high levels of technical consistency across IT projects with limited resources and often with limited authority. Many EA groups implement some variation of an architecture review as the means to drive architectural assessment and recommendations into individual projects. To uncover architecture review best practices, Forrester spoke with architects and EA managers at 15 organizations with existing architecture review programs. Our research uncovered best practices in four areas — communications, use of authority, review program structure, and review process artifacts. Programs with strong executive support and multistage review processes are the most successful, but we found that application of these best practices can improve the effectiveness of any architecture review program.