Tier 1 — Start Here
Core Practice Foundation
Build the practice skills every business architect needs. These courses establish the foundation you'll apply in your sector.
4
Courses
4
Available Now
~64
Total Hours
Foundation Courses
1
COR-BA-100Available
Closing the Strategy-Execution Gap
Learn why strategies fail at execution, and what a business architect does about it. This course introduces the Design4 framework through a real organisational case study, from crisis to capability. The foundation for everything that follows.
8 chapters16 hours
What you'll learn
- Name the specific gap breaking your organisation's strategy, and the pattern behind it, and explain both to a leadership team without a framework deck.
- Move through a disciplined cycle of discovery, strategic choice, capability design, and delivery, entering where your organisation needs it most.
- Ask four questions that tell you whether your organisation is doing the right things and actually getting the benefits, and know who should answer each one.
- Test whether your organisation's stated purpose has actually guided its costliest decisions.
- Measure services by what they produce, and claim outcomes only when the evidence comes back.
- Design a 90-day first cycle that demonstrates value before anyone is asked to believe in a new approach.
- Help an organisation get stronger with each disruption, not just survive it.
2
COR-BA-101Available
Building the Common Language
Build the shared vocabulary that makes cross-functional work possible. You'll learn to read a business model, a capability hierarchy and a recipe card, adapt a sector reference model to your organisation, and keep the vocabulary alive once it's in place. Higher education's HERM is the example throughout.
8 chapters16 hours
What you'll learn
- See exactly where your organisation is paying the cost of missing shared vocabulary, and name it in terms leadership already feels.
- Read any business model, capability hierarchy, or operational recipe card and extract the strategic insight without formal modelling training.
- Evaluate a reference model against your own organisational context, and know when to consult it and when to make it your own: what to adopt, what to adapt, and what to leave behind.
- Use the right reference model at each Design4 phase, from a sector theory of change in Discover to an operational pattern in Deliver, and bring its evidence to governance.
- Know what it takes to build and sustain shared vocabulary over time, and what organisational conditions determine whether it takes hold.
- Design a first reference model initiative scoped to deliver visible value before anyone is asked to commit to a new approach.
3
COR-BA-102Available
Communicating Business Architecture
Master the communication skills that determine whether your work actually lands. Executive briefs, working sessions, resistance types: this course covers how to write, present, and facilitate for the audiences that matter.
8 chapters16 hours
What you'll learn
- Take any architecture finding and reframe it for the specific room you're walking into, without losing the insight.
- Know what each stakeholder needs to hear, in what format, and at what moment, before you start communicating.
- Build the story that gets architecture findings from the model into someone else's decision.
- Design and lead the conversations that produce alignment, rather than presentations that inform without moving anyone.
- Write three pages that are more effective than forty, structured to earn a specific decision, not just to document your findings.
- Read resistance as information, and respond in a way that keeps the findings intact without escalating.
- Build an ongoing communication practice that keeps architecture visible and useful long after the crisis energy fades.
4
COR-BA-103Available
Shaping What Gets Built
Learn how to shape what gets built. Solution oversight, vendor negotiation, AI proposal assessment, benefits tracking: from a practitioner's perspective, not a theorist's.
8 chapters16 hours
What you'll learn
- Recognize when your role shifts from designing to overseeing, and know what changes, who you're now working with, and what each relationship requires.
- Read any technical assessment of current systems and add the dimension the technical view leaves out: does this serve the architecture?
- Bridge from architecture artifacts to requirements that solution teams can act on, and verify that strategic intent survived the handoff.
- Evaluate any solution proposal, including AI and emerging platforms, against whether it actually closes the capability gap the architecture identified.
- Sequence a portfolio of change by what the architecture requires, not by political convenience or standalone business case strength.
- Track whether delivered solutions are closing the capability gaps they were funded to close, and feed what you learn back into the architecture so the cycle continues.
What You Walk Away With
Real work in your actual organization
Every foundation course produces a deliverable — not a worksheet. By the end you'll have a named diagnosis of your strategy-execution gap and a first action scoped to your organization's actual situation.
After Foundation: Apply It to Your Sector
Once you have the core practice skills, apply them even further in the context that matters most to you.