The BPT loop is not free-for-all, first comes first served. Different roles are assigned to different segments. That fact defines jurisdiction — the boundary within which a role operates, decides, and is accountable.
Jurisdiction is not hierarchy. A Business Leader is not senior to an Engineer in the BPT loop. They operate in different domain with different role bound concerns. (hint: EA is the only role whose jurisdiction is the whole organisation).
| Roles | Jurisdiction | Activities |
|---|---|---|
| Business Leaders, Clients, Product Owners, BAs | Business | Declares products, owns outcomes |
| Product Owners, BAs, QAs | Product | Bridges Business declarations and Technology capabilities — the alignment point |
| Engineers, Developers, DevOps | Technology | Implements what Product defines |
| Enterprise Architects | Organisation | Overarching — governs the meta-layer, guides all transitions without bottlenecking |
BA — Business Analyst. QA — Quality Assurance.
Some roles may appear in more than one BPT domain. A Product Owner sits in both Business and Product. A BA may work across all three. What changes is the nature of the work — declaring in Business, aligning in Product. The jurisdiction defines the role, not the person.
EA’s jurisdiction is the whole organisation — not a segment, not a project. This is what makes it the governing role.
EA does not implement, does not manage products, and does not operate infrastructure. It governs the structure within which all of those happen.
The BPT domain are named Business, Product, and Technology. The roles inside the Technology segment are primarily Engineers and DevOps — Engineering describes the roles, Technology is the domain name. This distinction matters when reading diagrams and deliverables: the domain name is always Technology.
Definitions and terms may appear in singular or plural depending on the size of the organisation. It is rare for there to be only one product or one team. The model scales — see One wheel or many.