Theory 20 minutes + Workshop 60 minutes
Duration: 80 minutes. Artefact produced: Options paper and staged migration roadmap.
Module Overview
Separate real options from preferences, slogans, and vendor-led assumptions.
Evaluate cost, risk, delivery feasibility, capability impact, and governance burden.
Convert the preferred option into transition states that can actually execute.
Explain what needs to be decided, why now, and what happens if the decision is deferred.
Theory
A useful options paper does not prove that the architect was right from the beginning. It gives decision-makers a disciplined view of viable paths, consequences, risks, and trade-offs. The roadmap then turns the selected option into a sequence of transition states. Without that sequence, an option remains a recommendation rather than an executable architecture.
Workshop
The organisation can rehost workloads quickly, rebuild around a new cloud platform, or adopt a hybrid phased transition. Each path has different cost, risk, operational, security, and stakeholder consequences.
Create a three-option paper and a migration roadmap with three transition states.
Present the recommended option to an executive committee and explain why the other options were not selected.
Options comparison table; recommendation statement; transition roadmap; top five risks; next decision required.
Unit 2 — UML Modelling.