The BAPO principle

The BAPO model by Jan Bosch (2017) describes four aspects of a development activity and also suggests a sequence for processing them. The four elements are:

B for Business: Business is how we generate revenue and profit as an organization
A for Architecture: Architecture is the technology, tools and structure we use to build our system
P for Process: Processes are the activities and working methods we use in our daily work (we also use the “P” here for people, based on an idea by Jörg Jockel).
O for organization: The organization is the departments, teams and responsibilities that form the structure of the company

They are all connected, but they are often not coordinated. We have already seen what the typical consequences are when discussing Conway’s Law.

It is also interesting that companies are often not BAPO, but OPAB: The existing organization is used as a basis for defining processes out of convenience, which in turn leads to a haphazard architecture. This restrictive architecture, driven by the organization’s past rather than its future, then provides a very limited set of options for developing business strategies.

The better order is to follow B-A-P-O.

To implement this, we need to know the basics of our business strategy:

WHO: who will we serve?
HOW: will we serve these customers?
WHAT: which customers and services are NOT part of our business?

BAPO is a wonderfully simple way of operationalizing the principles and strategies we have developed.

BAPO model: Franz von der LInden, Philips Medical Systems

Table Of Contents

Add a header to begin generating the table of contents

Categories

Categories List