Project Management with EA

The EA approach to Project Management

Sparx Enterprise Architect (EA) is primarily a modelling environment designed to capture and analyse complex systems. It also includes project-oriented features—tasks, risks, issues—and a native Gantt view. Used well, this combination can keep project information close to the architecture and requirements it depends on. That said, teams quickly notice some differences from dedicated project tools.

The most visible difference is the Gantt chart itself. EA’s Gantt shows task bars on a timeline, but does not display dependency lines between tasks. In real projects, understanding how one task’s delay ripples into another is fundamental; without visible links, the Gantt becomes a static view of dates. EA still allows you to model dependencies as connectors on diagrams, but those links don’t appear on the Gantt timeline, so impact analysis remains manual or diagram-driven.

A second, subtler difference is what can appear in the Gantt. In a conventional project tool, the Gantt contains tasks, and only tasks. EA, by contrast, can open the Gantt for almost any set of elements—requirements, components, test cases, and so on—if they carry schedule-like properties. This is powerful for traceability (you can sit directly on the artefacts you care about), but it can feel unfamiliar to project managers. For example, opening a Requirement in a Gantt view may be surprising if you expect the chart to be a pure task list. A gentle, practical pattern is to open the tasks that deliver or verify the requirement instead, using EA’s links to keep the relationship clear. That way, PMs retain the familiar “tasks on a timeline” mental model, while modellers still benefit from EA’s broader element relationships.

EA Tasks

EA’s task management is intentionally lightweight. Task elements capture dates, status, priority and ownership, but there’s no full scheduling engine: tasks are just tasks, and automatic date roll-ups aren’t recalculated when dependencies change. That’s fine for simple plans, but larger or fast-moving projects may find themselves doing more manual updates—or exporting to tools like Microsoft Project—when they need critical-path style behavior.

Risks and Issues

On risks and issues, EA shines in traceability. Risks and issues can be modelled as first-class elements and linked to tasks, requirements, components, and tests. This keeps governance close to the work. The trade-off is in monitoring: out of the box, there are fewer interactive dashboards, heatmaps, or “top-N” views that project managers expect. You can report and query these items, but prioritising and tracking them day-to-day typically needs custom searches, scripts, or an add-in.

Summary

Overall, EA brings strong integration and traceability to project work: tasks, risks, issues, and the model live together. The differences—no dependency lines on the Gantt, lightweight scheduling, and the ability to Gantt “more than tasks”—are best seen as design choices rather than flaws. If teams lean into tasks as the primary Gantt content, and use links to tie those tasks to requirements and other artefacts, EA can complement a project tool nicely, or even cover simpler delivery scenarios inside the modelling environment.

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