Speaker 1: Today, we are going to show you how to align your business goals with your technical roadmap using Sigrid. My name is Ken and I'll be playing the role of a manager today.

Speaker 2: And my name is Shima and I'll be playing the role of enterprise architect. Ken, can you explain to us why it is important to align business goals with technical objectives?

Speaker 1: Yes. So, aligning business goals with technical objectives is very important because it ensures that everyone in the company works towards the same overarching objectives. This eliminates working in silos and it fosters a culture of collaboration. So by translating these more abstract business goals into measurable technical milestones, teams can track and report progress a little bit more easily and meaningfully to both technical people and also non-technical stakeholders. So this will create a shared understanding across departments and it makes it easier to evaluate success and also to make informed decisions.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree. Let's get into it then. Let's discuss the business goals.

Speaker 1: Great. So, as a manager, I have three main business goals this year. First, I want to shorten the time to market. Secondly, we want to reduce our cybersecurity breaches. And as a third one, we expect a huge increase in our usage for our platform. So we want to work on improving the system scalability. So Shima, can you tell me how we can make sure that our technical roadmap aligns with these business goals?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So for the first goal, for shortening the time to market, it is important to discuss with the teams and look at the overall state of our portfolio with all of our applications, which we did. And we discussed that the state of the systems are at a pretty good state. So we decided to set an objective of 3.5 maintainability for all of our systems. This is important to maintain a sustainable, future-proof, debt-free, or at least reduced amount of debt, so we can speed up our delivery.

Speaker 1: That sounds great. So can we set that objective in SIGGRAD?

Speaker 2: Yeah, we can do that. Let's start doing that. Okay, so I'm very excited to set these objectives on the SIGGRAD platform. So with the team, we can start working on them. So I'm now on the portfolio objective page. This is a new page, and it is under development. However, I know that you use SIGGRAD, and you're more comfortable with, or you're more used to the portfolio overview. We still have this view. You can navigate to it and still work with it and have an overview of what's going on. But since today we're going to set portfolio objectives, I'm going to navigate back, and then we can start setting our objectives. So Ken, based on our previous discussions, I already went ahead and gave it a try and set an objective for the open source health max vulnerability. And previously, we discussed that we don't want any risks that are higher than medium for this target. I can see that with the progress, this objective applies to 17 of our systems, and 12 of them are compliant. So that's really good. We can only focus on five of our systems to then meet our objective. I forgot why it applies to 17 of our systems, but in the rationale, I can see that this target applies to our public-facing systems, and we're expecting to increase our cyber security there as well by addressing or ensuring that there are no third-party vulnerabilities with medium or high severity findings. Great. Okay. So let's now set up the new portfolio objective. And here, our goal is to shorten our time to market by ensuring we have a sustainable and future-proof software. This is done by maintaining it and reaching a maintainable target of three-point stars, which we agreed on. So I'm going to navigate to the Add Portfolio Objective button. I'm going to first select our capability, which is maintainability. I'm going to choose the objective type, which is also maintainability, and set the target, which we agreed on. Moving on, we also discussed that we want to set all these objectives or this objective for all of our systems. Previously, we set public-facing for the open-source health, but now it's more universal. So I'm going to click on the Apply to All Systems, and it's working, looks nice. And then moving on to the rationale. So I like to use the rationale to discuss our business goals and tie it back to our technical objectives. So this is the place I use to put this information. And then this is really nice because then the entire team can have a look at it, and if I'm not there, they can also still link it back and have a look and be aware of our decisions. Moving on, I can see in the summary that everything looks good. Let's save and finalize, and I can see that the maintainability objective is now on the table.

Speaker 1: I see that we only need to improve 12 systems and then we achieve our goal. Yes.

Speaker 2: That's great. Yeah. So we're on the right track. So shall we discuss the next goal?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So our next goal is to reduce our cybersecurity breaches. So maybe we can also translate that into a technical objective.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I also discussed this with the team, and we discussed that with the state of our systems, it will be difficult to universally for our entire application to reach the goal we want to, but we can do this in steps and by focusing on the areas that are most vulnerable. This is our public facing systems, and there we think that we should not have any vulnerabilities that are higher than low severity. And this is the decision we made. So maybe you can give it a try. Would you like to set the objective?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Can I also set this objective?

Speaker 2: Yes. You have admin rights, so you should be able to do it.

Speaker 1: That's great. Let's try it.

Speaker 2: Sounds good.

Speaker 1: Here it is. So I can add a portfolio objective, then select security as the capability. We want to look at the maximum severity of vulnerabilities that we will allow in secret, and then select low because we don't want security vulnerabilities higher than low. So we discussed that we want to prioritize it first for our public facing systems because these are the most important for now. So let's select the public facing systems. Great. Now we can add the rationale where I can tie it back to our business goals. So everyone is aligned on those, then we can add them. And I see that we still have a lot of work to do to make our platform secure.

Speaker 2: So you should work with the team to get this ready. So there was also a third goal that you discussed, and it was to improve the system scalability to handle increased user load. So when we discussed with the team, we decided that, hey, this is a lot of work, a lot of cost for our entire portfolio. We need to narrow down and prioritize. Can you give us a little bit more explanation at what's going on and where we should focus?

Speaker 1: So the system that we think is our highest priority is Artemis because we expect a huge growth in usage in the coming year. So maybe we can focus on that first.

Speaker 2: Yep. Actually, we had a discussion with the team earlier about this system. And when we were looking at it, we realized that the state that it is now, if we set the objective at 3.5, then we are in the right path to get to where we want. So I am going to navigate to Secret again. And what you're looking at is the landing page, which is the portfolio overview. And I'm going to find Artemis in the search bar so we can set these objectives. So this is different from what we did before. Before we were setting objectives at the portfolio level because we were saying we want it for all of our systems or we want it for a group of our systems. But now we just want it for one system. So we need to set a system level objective. So you have to navigate to the system overview, which is what you're seeing right now, the system overview. On the top, you can see it rate by risk, which is what we know. And then you can see a system detail over here. And then on the other side, you can see the system objective overview.

Speaker 1: And here I can see that some of the portfolio objectives we set before also apply for this

Speaker 2: system. Yeah, it's already inherited. So it looks very nice. Everything is here. So let's have a look at Artemis architecture quality. If you look at the risk assessment of it or the risk overview, you can see that for architecture, the star rating is 3.1 now. So I think that the agreed upon 3.5 is indeed achievable and realistic. So I'm going to navigate to modify objectives button, click on it and then navigate to find the architecture card where I can define the objective for it. I'm adding an objective of 3.5 stars and saving it.

Speaker 1: Great. So now we've set all these objectives. Is there a way to see all the portfolio objectives in one view?

Speaker 2: That's a very good question. Yes, you can. So if you go back to the portfolio overview and then here you see rate by risk and rates by objective completeness. So if you navigate to this one, you can see how your systems are doing with the objective against the targets that you've set. So I think we can already find Artemis here somewhere and we can see it's partially met.

Speaker 1: Okay, this is a nice view because this actually shows us the priority with the business context we added.

Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. And we can work on it with our teams to see how to move on, move forward. So shall we conclude and also hand it over to the team?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So as you can see, we successfully aligned our business goals with our technical objectives using SIGGRID and this ensures that all the teams know what to focus on and it helps us track progress effectively.

Speaker 2: Exactly. And the best part is that the objectives we set are achievable, they're realistic, they're aligned with the team, they're aligned with the business context and everyone is on the same page so we can start working.

Speaker 1: Yeah.