Preparing for a WAFR
It's important not to rush into running a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) without sufficient preparation. Rushing can lead to the process taking longer than expected, which provides a less favorable outcome and makes taking action more difficult.
Reviewing an architecture has an associated human cost. If a group or team member can prepare upfront, this saves time in later stages, where more people are required to attend sessions. This can also remove the requirement for larger group discussions through improved session planning and asynchronous communication techniques.
Having a clear definition of who owns the workload, how it is architected, its purpose, and its alignment with your organization's business outcomes can help you achieve a better result during the review and improve phases.
The preparation phase consists of three key elements:
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Workload and scope
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People and culture
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Documentation and infrastructure
Mechanisms
Mechanisms replace human best efforts with repeatable, scalable processes and tools, which are often automated, to achieve a desired outcome. A mechanism is a complete cycle where you create a tool or a process, drive its adoption, and inspect the results to make course corrections. This cycle takes controllable inputs and transforms them into ongoing outputs to address a recurring business challenge.
The cyclic nature of a mechanism makes it best suited for solving recurring problems or opportunities. The WAFR is a mechanism with a tool, an adoption process, and an inspection process that all operate in a complete cycle.
When conducting WAFRs of your workloads, you identify improvement opportunities to develop other mechanisms in your organization. The outcomes from a WAFR should not be one time fixes for a single team but should instead be shared across multiple teams to deliver most value.
Business outcomes
Before you start making changes to technology, determine your business priorities. It's less effective to review your architecture without a clear understanding of your organization's priorities. These priorities can serve as guidelines to help you maintain alignment and deliver better results.
Business outcomes are key high-value business objectives that are tied to organizational strategy and driven by customer feedback. They are purposefully high level so that different teams can define more specific goals to achieve those outcomes.
Examples of common business outcomes are:
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Reduce costs
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Increase profit
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Improve customer satisfaction
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Improve customer retention
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Improve staff retention
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Improve environmental sustainability
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Improve security posture
Being aware of and working backwards from your organization's business outcomes helps you save time by focusing on the technology changes that can make the most impact toward your organization's goals. This in turn increases trust with your leadership.
Discover and discuss what are currently the business priorities for your organization, business unit, or team.
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