IoT Design

Viability Assessment for IoT Solutions

A critical architectural and design requirement

Introduction

In this article, I aim to introduce a critical architectural and design tool to validate the feasibility of IoT (Internet of Things) solutions across the project lifecycle. I attempt to explain what this tool does, why we need to use it, and how we create, document, analyze, and communicate it to relevant stakeholders of the IoT solutions.

Viability Assessment is a critical architectural and design tool to meet business organizations’ standards, solution requirements, use cases, project quality criteria, industry compliance, and consumer expectations. This article provides awareness for IoT solution architects to use this tool effectively. Without applying proper viability assessment, IoT projects can most certainly fail!

As solution architects and designers, we use a viability assessment work-product, which exists in many proprietary and open-source architectural solution methods. We can either use a viability assessment work-product template from an established open-source method such as TOGAF or our business organization’s proprietary method.

What is a viability assessment work product, and why do we need it?

This work-product guides the solution architects and designers:

To identify and resolve issues,

To identify and mitigate risks and dependencies,

To validate assumptions of solutions.

Viability assessment work-product is a template covering all aspects of our IoT solution, particularly from its feasibility, usability, consumption, and operations perspectives focusing on maintaining the quality of the solutions.

One cautious note is that the viability assessment can be categorized under different names in different architectural methods. To ensure, please check which work product is used in your proprietary method to capture risks, issues, assumptions, constraints, and dependencies of solutions.

Like any other technology initiative, conducting viability assessments for IoT solutions is also a critical success factor. Due to the complex and interrelated nature of IoT solution building blocks, the IoT ecosystem in a business organization can pose multiple issues, substantial risks, a multitude of dependencies, and intricate inter-dependencies from various angles.

Purpose of Viability Assessment

The primary purpose of conducting viability assessments is to focus on capturing, analyzing, and understanding the risks, issues, dependencies, and assumptions associated with the solution and create awareness of the realities that need to be considered at all levels, e.g., technical, business, financial, commercial, security, privacy, and industry compliance.

Upon identifying the issues, risks, and dependencies, and making necessary assumptions, as IoT solution architects, we must analyze, sort them out in priority order, and communicate our findings to the key stakeholders of the initiatives.

In the project management discipline, the viability assessment is reflected in a RAID table managed by the project managers. RAID stands for Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies. This can be a spreadsheet document or project monitoring document such as created by the MS Project software.

As solution architects and designers, we provide our viability assessment to the project managers who can convert the architectural speak to project management speak using this RAID table. Project managers monitor the health of the solution using the RAID table, which is a primary communication tool in the project and solution lifecycle.

In priority order, we start with identifying and addressing the issues. In the Viability Assessment work-product, we must clearly define the issues and generate options to resolve these issues. Further, these issues need to be assigned to relevant owners. Issues can include the current constraints and impediments evident in the current state of the environment, which can adversely affect the future state and successful completion of the IoT projects at hand.

Then we move into risks in the priority order. After a comprehensive analysis of the solution's current state and future state, identified risks can be mitigated based on their likelihood and impact. We must first prioritize high impact and high probability risks, and then move on to the items labeled as medium likelihood and impact, consecutively to low likelihood and impact.

The next step is dealing with dependencies. It is critical to define dependencies and relationships. We need to be cautious that there may also be some inter-dependencies between multiple components or building blocks of the solutions. The type of dependency, implications, and potential impact must be articulated in the viability assessment work-product.

Who involves in the viability assessment process, and why?

Conducting a viability assessment is a collaborative activity within the solution team. It is an important lesson learned from failed projects that if the issues, risks, and dependencies are developed in isolation, things may fall into the cracks, and no one can pick up those items in critical situations, which can be detrimental to the success of the project. More dramatically, if issues raise and dependencies are discovered in the operational state, this can be a disaster for the business organization because it can affect the service levels and adversely affect the business reputation of the organization.

This means that it is not only the IoT solution architects and designers who develop risks, issues, and dependencies; we also must engage and consult with enterprise architects, business architects, technical specialists (e.g., security, network, infrastructure, applications, middleware, data), subject matter experts in various domains, business stakeholders, representative users, and the project managers. In short, the entire solution team is responsible and accountable for this critical task, especially in the earlier phase of the solution lifecycle.

Even though solution architects, domain architects, and specialists analyze and determine the viability of the solutions from technical and architectural perspectives, other stakeholders provide additional input, and the project managers at the initiative level, and the program managers across the program, must monitor, facilitate, and communicate them for resolution.

Viability assessment can and should take place in all phases of the solution lifecycle, such as architecture, design, test, deployment, and operational handover. All RAID items must be traced and monitored regularly. At the end of the solution, all items must be closed off. For example, all risks must be mitigated, all issues must be resolved, all dependencies must be addressed, and all assumptions must be validated.

More specifically, there must not be any assumptions at the end of the lifecycle. The assumptions during the analysis phase can be turned into risks or dependencies. This is a common project best practice as IoT solution architects and designers need to adhere to during the overall IoT solution lifecycle.

Conclusions

To conclude, developing a comprehensive viability assessment can help us mitigate critical risks, resolve existing issues, validate assumptions, address challenging constraints, and deal with dependencies, and complex inter-dependencies.

Missing this critical step in our solution lifecycle can result in dire consequences especially in the long run when the products and services are in use. Therefore, producing a well analyzed, agreed, and approved viability assessment work-product is a mandatory step in the lifecycle of the IoT solutions initiative.

Most of the time, assessing the viability of the solution also requires making a considerable number of trade-offs and making critical architectural decisions to reach optimal outcomes for the IoT solutions.

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