Ardoq's Scenarios is designed to document planned changes to your architecture and to illustrate potential future states. Your plans and experiments can be used to communicate with your team and your stakeholders.

In this example, we will show you how to use the Scenarios functionality to build out an application roadmap.

This organization has been using Microsoft Skype for Business for its internal Instant Messaging and Presence capabilities. Microsoft has announced that Skype for Business will go end of life due to the release of Microsoft Teams. The architecture team created an application roadmap for Skype for Business that reflects when it’s end-of-life will take place and the various dependencies that need to be addressed in the implementation, migration, and retirement of Skype for Business

Skype for Business Current State

Skype for Business Future State

In this example, we are going with a multi-phase project approach, which will allow us to be granular in showing the changes over a specific period.

Because we have taken a multi-phase approach we will create scenarios for each phase to reflect the specific changes. To create your phases just take your current state captured from above and create a scenario. This will take all the selected components and add them into a temporary branch (scenario) off of the current state, this allows us to make changes without impacting the current state data.

In the integration phase, we are building the integrations between our identity services (Exchange, ADFS) and Microsoft Teams. The scenario that was just created needs to show the integration implementation. This is done by creating two Flows To references from ADFS and Exchange to Microsoft Teams.

In the migration phase, we are representing that we will migrate the user base from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams or Slack. We do this by creating another scenario based on the current state and then creating two references and using the reference Display Text.

Up until this point, all the proposed changes have been additive. But with decommissioning services, we will start to see the impact and future state. Firstly we need to create another scenario based on the current state. Now we need this new scenario to reflect the total number of changes that will take place, this includes the additions in the previous two phases as well as all the changes that take place in the Retirement phase. We do this by deleting all the components and references that are no longer needed. In this case, deleting the references from the business capabilities, and deleting the Skype for Business application and its supporting infrastructure.

We can see that Skype for Business and its supporting infrastructure are no longer there. We can use the visual difference feature to show the changes that will be taking place in the final phase. The end result is a scenario with the desired end state of the roadmap.

A big part of an application roadmap is understanding the timelines of all the connected components and the dependencies that exist between them.

What we know is that Skype for Business has an end of support date. We can work backwards from there to ensure minimal end-user disruption. To visualize this there are a few things we need to do:

From the timeline above we can see the systems impacted in each phase and when each respective phase will start and stop as well as any milestones.

Now that you have built everything, you can put all of the visuals together into a presentation that you can share with your stakeholders. You can also use the generated presentation link elsewhere in Ardoq, for example, you could create an Application Roadmap URL field on the Application Component Type and paste the presentation link in it. Then you could set up a dashboard widget to show you all the applications that are missing roadmaps.

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