4 min read
I passed TOGAF 10 Foundation, Practitioner, and Applied Practitioner in July 2026. Three badges, one accelerated week, and an exam I’d been quietly intimidated by for years. This isn’t a revision guide – it’s the stuff that doesn’t go in one: the context, the shortcut, and the one thing that made it all click.
In this piece:
- TOGAF lands differently depending on where you’re standing when you read it.
- If you work in the Microsoft ecosystem, you already know this.
- Do the accredited training.
- Why TOGAF matters now more than before.
TOGAF lands differently depending on where you’re standing when you read it.
If you’re already working as a practising architect – preparing solutions, sitting in governance boards, talking business language with stakeholders, managing change requests, running readiness and maturity assessments – TOGAF will feel less like learning something new and more like being handed a dictionary for a language you’ve been speaking for years.
Every ADM phase maps directly onto something you’ve already done in practice. You’ve prepared solution blueprints and presented them to a steering committee. That’s Phase A. You’ve built business architecture views and translated them for a CFO. That’s Phase B. You’ve managed scope creep on a live programme, fielded the change request at 4pm on a Friday, and somehow convinced the client it was in their interest. That’s Phase H. TOGAF gives you the name and the structure for what you’ve already been doing.
You can absolutely approach TOGAF without that background – the framework is comprehensive enough to teach from first principles. But if you’ve got years of architecture delivery behind you, the concepts will click faster, the governance constructs will feel familiar, and the exam scenarios will read more like case studies than hypotheticals.
If you work in the Microsoft ecosystem, you already know this.
Here’s what no one writes about: Microsoft Success by Design – the structured implementation methodology for Dynamics 365 – is TOGAF in a different suit.
The phases map almost directly. SbD’s Discover, Initiate, Implement, Prepare, Operate sequence is a condensed version of the TOGAF ADM. The Solution Blueprint Review in SbD is the Architecture Review Board in TOGAF. The go/no-go gates, the findings model (assertions, risks, issues), the escalation paths before costly reversals – all of it has a TOGAF equivalent, often with almost identical intent.
The accreditation just makes it official.
The key difference is scope. TOGAF is enterprise-wide and methodology-agnostic. SbD is product-aligned and sits on top of your chosen delivery approach. But if you’ve spent years running SbD reviews, handling readiness assessments, presenting maturity models to client leadership, and managing architecture governance across a programme – you’ve been doing TOGAF in practice. The accreditation just makes it official.
For anyone in the Microsoft partner space who has wondered whether TOGAF is worth pursuing: yes, and the ramp is shorter than you think.
Do the accredited training.
I could have self-studied. The exam isn’t impenetrable. But there are two reasons I’d recommend the accredited route without hesitation.
First, the Applied Practitioner badge is only available through accredited training. It requires completion of a minimum of ten supervised practical exercises under an accredited instructor. You cannot get it any other way. And it matters – because it signals something the Foundation and Practitioner badges alone don’t: that you’ve applied the framework to realistic enterprise scenarios, not just memorised the ADM phases.
Second, and more practically: the instructor explains what the question is actually asking. TOGAF exam language is specific in ways that catch people out, and the difference between the correct and almost-correct answer often comes down to the TOGAF definition of a term you thought you understood. An experienced instructor short-circuits a lot of that confusion.
Why TOGAF matters now more than before.
Enterprise architecture governance has never been optional, but it’s become urgent. Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will include AI agents by 2026, up from under 5% just a few years ago. That’s an enormous surface area for ungoverned AI to create risk.
TOGAF gives you the Architecture Review Board structure, the decision authority framework, the compliance scaffolding, and the change management process to govern AI adoption with the same rigour you’d apply to any other major enterprise architecture decision. The organisations that are getting AI adoption right are the ones treating it as an architecture problem – not a delivery problem.
The organisations that are getting AI adoption right are the ones treating it as an architecture problem – not a delivery problem.
If you’re an enterprise architect in 2026 and you don’t have a structured answer to ‘how do we govern AI decisions at scale?’, TOGAF gives you that language and those mechanisms. That’s not a small thing.