Late morning on 11th October 2023 in London was pleasantly warmer than usual, with a buzz of activity at the UK IRM Enterprise Architecture Conference. Earlier that morning I had delivered a keynote “Some Hard Truths from Twenty-five Years of EA Work”, now I was deep in conversation with Paul Homan. A conversation that was about to set my course for the next 16 months.
This is not a quick soundbite post. If you read through to the end you’ll get an understanding of what it takes for three people who have only just met to get a book written and published in 16 months. If you want to find out more about the book itself then look here The Survivor’s Guide to Enterprise Architecture. If you want to hear us talk about some of the key lessons then come to the Enterprise and Business Architecture Conference Europe this summer where Chloë and I will be delivering the keynote “Pragmatic and Practical – How to Survive as an Architect” on Monday June 16th. I will also be doing a one-day workshop “Surviving Enterprise Architecture” on Thursday 19th.
My career as an EA has developed hand-in-hand with my relationship with this IRM conference. I’ve met many great people at this event which for the last quarter century has brought together the people who do the work of enterprise architecture to share and learn from each other. I’ve presented many times, and each time the activity of presenting has forced me to really focus on what I’ve been learning to be able to get the message clearly across to others.
But back to Paul. He was already in conversation with Ian Borthwick, Head of Publishing at the British Computer Society about a book for Enterprise Architects. Paul introduced me to Ian, who then introduced us to Chloë Gray.
The next seven months looked like this:
November – a few calls on Zoom and Teams to get to know each other and work through what we would want the book to be about.
December – create some online shared spaces to work in and start to collate materials and ideas for the chapters and an outline structure. This was not going to be a book about frameworks and models. We wanted to focus on what the day-to-day reality is like in this role and how to do it well. We wanted the book we wished someone had given us when we started as EAs, so we would have had a better idea ourselves of the challenges ahead.
January – we had grouped the ideas and created five sections with different themes. Beginning (Again), Doing, Managing, Being and Surviving. We had a simple Excel file, where each section was then broken down into the topics and stories we had collated. This gave a feel for the breadth and depth, potential overlaps, and the size of the book. We continued to refine this plan but at the same time it gave the BCS something to review to understand our intentions.
February – we now moved on to creating the book proposal. This wasn’t a done deal just because we had met Ian. We had to research the market, consider the audience and prove the book would be financially viable and a good fit for the BCS.
March – time to wrap up the final proposal, clean up the plan for the structure and negotiate some details for the contract. Most of a publishing contract is fairly standard, but the key element at this stage is the agreement on when content will be written and passed over to BCS editors. Resources need to be scheduled from the publishing side, but as authors we had to work out how to commit the time to writing around our day jobs and families so we could deliver a set numbers of words by specific dates.
April 23rd we received an email from Heather Wood, our Commissioning Editor at BCS Publishing which started with:
“Dear Martin, Chloe and Paul,
This week I met with the Head of Publishing and Director of Publishing Sales, and I am happy to report that your book has been internally approved, and we would like to offer you a publishing contract. Congratulations!”
With this we had a deadline of 31st October for the final manuscript. The title was proposed as “Enterprise Architecture” witha subtitle something like: ‘Real world applications’.
May – Three weeks after approval the title had changed to what we have today, all the metadata for the book was defined (including the number of pages and format) and a publication date of 19th February 2025 was locked in. By late May we were picking from suggested images for the book cover. The BCS team have a theme for their architecture portfolio that uses buildings. We were provided suggestions that ranged from formal gardens in a European chateau, city streets with multiple building types, cathedrals, modern suspension bridges and cottages on tall rock pillars. All this and we still hadn’t written a chapter!
Writing
Chloë had built a writing plan to keep us to a schedule. That included many Zoom calls to discuss the content, allowances for holidays and some feedback loops. Our typical writing cycle started with a two-hour call to talk about the stories and content, then a bulk writing activity to get the rough content down, and an editing cycle.
Getting used to our writing styles and finding a combined style took a few months. In that time there was a lot reviewing and editing. Our progress to plan slipped a lot. But just as with learning anything else what takes a lot of effort initially becomes second nature by the end. Far more evenings and weekends had to be committed than planned.
The first content was passed to the BCS on 2nd August. In total 31,500 words comprising the Introduction, half the Beginning section and the Doing section. At the end of August our second content drop completed the Beginning section, included edits to the Doing section and added all the content for the Managing section. We were up to 49,500 words with a maximum of 70,000 for the whole book.
We had planned to provide monthly drops of content to the BCS with a hope of a rapid review, but initially feedback was slow coming. Even reviewers go on holiday over the summer months! The feedback from five reviewers started to arrive in late September, and this proved just in time to help as we also could do some restructuring before the final content drop. The reviewers were spotting where we were not providing enough context, being too repetitive, or failing to put in the ‘so what’ after an observation. If you plan to write a book, don’t skip on the reviewers. It’s essential to understand what someone else will read into what you write. But don’t expect them to be consistent, especially where your content may be about experience. A maths textbook is either correct or not. A guide to enterprise architecture comes with a lot of contextual advice based on individual experience.
October was hectic. More feedback was coming in, we were driving hard for the final content drop at the end of the month and we were also cleaning up all the diagrams and checking references. Chloë’s husband, Paul, was also contributing to the effort now, creating some stick figure drawings to add a little more character to the book. Our two final sections Being and Surviving were handed over on the 26th. Then we started working through the rest of the feedback that was being received.
During November the content was merged into one manuscript and passed to the BCS Copy Editing team. Just like that the writing stopped! There was nothing to do now but wait. Over the next month we fielded questions about the numbering of sections and the use of certain phrases, but nothing too significant. Paul retired and acquired a puppy which did distract him a lot.
On the 19th December we received a PDF for review, with a target date of 7th January to provide feedback. This had been copy-edited throughout and typeset for the final style, with a total of 226 pages and marginally just under the 70,000 word upper limit we had agreed to in May. This was our opportunity to incorporate any late feedback and a chance for us to re-read our own work after a sufficient break. In total we made 294 corrections or changes to the text and many updates to the diagrams.
We also started to identify people we wanted to provide the first reviews and potential endorsements to include on the book cover. We received the next proof on 16th January, mainly just to confirm that all the changes we had requested had been properly included. This one had a 48-hour turnaround time.
The final-final proof, now with an index and endorsements arrived on the 3rd February with 24 hours to give approval. Fifteen days until the planned launch date and we were ready.
Looking back
Writing a book with co-authors who have also been doing the same sort of work for decades makes you really reflect on what works and what doesn’t. No elegant EA theory survives first contact with organisational reality, but what remains after multiple iterations is worth sharing.
No matter how good your writing plan might be, the act of writing will always come second to the day job, if it’s not your day job.
We talk about writing a book, not about the many times you read the same content. After a while you come to forget which bits you’ve written. You will have read it and edited it so many times by the time it goes to print.
We could have continued editing, adding content and improving content for many more months, but there comes a point where you have to say “good enough” and let others start to use it. As we received the feedback from the first people to read the whole book the same phrase appeared multiple times “I wish I had this book when I started.”
We have done what we set out to.
I’m really looking forward to meeting with the IRM community in June to see what you think.
Martin
