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The MCA Architectural guidance and its content is intended for internal and external use, as defined by the MCA Strategy, Design and Architecture team.

2. Governance

This section provides the governance process that all Architecture work is expected to conform to.

2.1. Architecture Review Board

The Architecture Review Board’s (ARB) is made up of key personnel across IT at MCA. It’s role is to approve architectural changes, the impact of these changes, and any waivers that may be required.  This includes: - Govern technical designs to support project development and business improvement, - Identify & resolve cross-capability, cross-program, cross -release issues impacting the architecture,  - Ensuring design conformity, - Ensuring consistency and interoperability of designs, - Ensuring design suitability for meeting the stated functional and non-functional requirements, and - Integrating lower-level technical artefacts such as patterns and best practices.  - Accountable for ensuring the integrity and sign-off of high-level technical designs (HLD). - Responsible for ensuring the design complies with policies standards and any constraints.   - Ensuring that projects are consistent with the capabilities of the supporting services that they use. 

2.2. Service Transition

Partners are expected to work with MCA’s service transition team to provide key information which will be used to transition the architectural change into support.

2.3. Change Management

Partners are expected to work with MCA Architects & Delivery Managers to ensure changes are appropriately raised the manage the change into a live environment. Architectural changes cannot be made live without going through this process first.

2.3. Service Assessments

All public facing services need to adhere to the Government Service Standard. At the end of each project phase (Alpha, Public Beta & Private Beta), an assessment of the service is undertaken by Government Digital Services (GDS). It is expected that partners will assist in this process as necessary.

Any services for Public Beta, Private Beta & live must have a starting point hosted on Gov.UK, with an appropriate URL adhering to GDS standards.

Service assessments and applying the Service Standard - Service Manual - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Get a service domain name - Service Manual - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

This page was last reviewed on 24 July 2023.
This page was set to be reviewed before 24 July 2025. This might mean the content is out of date.