TOGAF® Enterprise Architecture Practitioner: ten practice papers
Eighty scenario questions across ten full papers, scored 5 / 3 / 1 / 0 exactly as OGEA-102 scores. Every option explained, every explanation referenced to the section it rests on.
The exam voucher costs USD 405. The ten-paper set costs $39.
What you get
| Papers | 10 full papers, 8 questions each, 80 questions in total |
|---|---|
| Format | Matches OGEA-102: 8 scenario questions, 90 minutes (120 with the ESL extension), pass mark 24 / 40 |
| Scoring | Gradient: 5 for the best answer, 3 for the second-best, 1 for the third, 0 for the distractor |
| Explanations | Every option on every question, not only the correct one, including why the second-best answer falls short |
| References | Each rationale cites the sections it rests on, so you can check it against the published standard |
| Delivery | Self-contained HTML files. Download once, run in any browser, works offline. No account, no login, no expiry |
| Licence | One person, yours permanently. Team licence for up to five people at one organisation. Corrections and revisions included |
How the papers run
Each paper opens in your browser and behaves like the test centre:
- One question per screen, with previous and next navigation
- Mark for review, and a review screen showing answered, unanswered and flagged
- A clock that turns red for the final five minutes
- A final submission confirmation that cannot be undone
- On expiry the paper auto-submits and scores what you committed, as Pearson VUE does
When you submit, the whole paper reopens with every rationale revealed and your score against each question. Most of the value is in that review.
A complete question, with its explanations
This is question 1 of paper 1, shown in full. Read the four options and decide which you would pick before reading on.
A specialty insurance group underwrites commercial and marine risk through centres in thirty countries and employs about 12,000 people. Premium income has grown for five years, but the expense ratio has worsened in each of the last three, and the board has begun asking why.
The group has never had a formal enterprise architecture practice. Change is proposed each year through budget submissions written by divisional heads, and funded largely on the strength of the submission. This has produced four regional claims platforms doing substantially the same work, three broker portals, and two modernisation programmes in flight with overlapping scope. Each was individually justified. Together they added cost, not capability.
There is no shared description of the estate. Each division maintains its own view, and the two modernisation programmes have produced target designs that do not agree with each other.
The CEO has secured board funding to build an enterprise architecture team and expects it to earn its place quickly, with no appetite for a long discovery exercise first. Several divisional heads are expected to resist any constraint on their submissions.
Budget preparation opens in four months. You are an external Enterprise Architect, newly engaged and reporting to the CEO, who asks how you will approach the first cycle of work so it influences the coming round.
Which of the following is the best answer?
A. Begin with the Preliminary Phase to tailor the framework to the group, agree architecture principles, select tooling and stand up the governance bodies. Then move to Phase A to produce the Architecture Vision, and work through Phases B, C and D to document the Baseline and Target Architectures across all four domains, completing each phase's outputs before entering the next so later phases rest on approved work. Present the resulting roadmap to the board once the architecture is complete.
B. Initiate an Architecture Project in Phase A, scoped explicitly by breadth, level of detail and planning horizon, and identify the stakeholders whose concerns are architecturally significant along with what each is worrying about. Secure their agreement on a summary target and the scope of change to reach it before detailed work begins. Then deliver Architecture to Support Strategy and then Portfolio, timed so the candidate roadmap reaches the decision-makers before budget preparation opens.
C. Initiate the work in Phase A and commit to Architecture to Support Strategy, but use the first period to build a complete and accurate description of the current state across all thirty countries and all four architecture domains, since gap analysis is only as reliable as the baseline beneath it. With that baseline established, develop the target state, identify the gaps and produce a roadmap the board can fund with confidence.
D. Advise the CEO that four months is not enough to produce architecture of sufficient quality to direct a funding round of this size. The EA capability should stand up quietly during the coming cycle, observing how budget preparation actually works and cataloguing the current estate as it goes. Begin architecture work in earnest once the round closes, so the following year's roadmap is thorough and properly evidenced.
B: best answer, 5 points
5 points
This is the only option that is correct on the method and correct on the timing, which is what the CEO actually asked about.
Phase A is the mandatory entry point for all architecture development; without the set-up it provides, architecture work slides off course. The set-up essentials are exactly the three things this answer names: define the scope of the Architecture Project in terms of the EA Landscape, breadth and planning horizon, which in turn confirm the necessary level of detail; identify the stakeholders whose concerns are architecturally significant along with those concerns; and assess the EA team's own capability to deliver. The completion essential is key stakeholder agreement on a summary of the target and the work to reach it, secured before detailed work is undertaken. That sequencing is not politeness; stakeholders who will not agree at the outset are unlikely to agree after the team has spent months detailing something they do not want.
The second half of the answer is what separates it from option A. Architecture is valuable when it informs a decision and near-worthless when it follows one. For an enterprise whose change is controlled by the budget cycle, the EA team must be aligned to that cycle. Working to a four-month deadline is not a compromise here, it is the correct behaviour. Delivering good architecture ahead of the decision beats delivering perfect architecture after it.
Evidence: A Practitioners' Approach, §5.2.1 (Phase A: The Starting Point); §3.2.1 (breadth, level of detail, time, recency as scoping characteristics); §4.1 and §4.1.1–4.1.2 (budget cycle alignment; architecture before the decision); §7.1; §11.2 (Failure Pattern: Missing the Business Cycle).
A: second-best answer, 3 points
A is a good answer, and a candidate who chooses it has understood the method. It still costs two marks.
3 points
Everything stated here can be found in the standard, and that is precisely the shape of a second-best answer: theoretically correct, quoting the phases in order, and wrong in practice.
Two problems. First, it treats the ADM as a sequential process model with phase gates, complete each phase's outputs before entering the next. The ADM graphic is a stylised representation of information flow, not an activity sequence; the phases that develop and test a candidate architecture stay open simultaneously and close as the information they owe is produced. Working it as a waterfall produces the confusion this answer embodies.
Second, and fatally for the CEO's question, "present the roadmap when the architecture is complete" surrenders the deadline. The board round opens in four months. An architecture presented after budget preparation validates decisions already taken, which is pointless at best and damaging at worst.
It scores 3 rather than 1 because the constituent activities are real and correctly named, and a candidate who chose it has understood the method even if they have not understood the business cycle.
Evidence: A Practitioners' Approach, §5.2 and §5.2.8 (the ADM is not a process model); §5.2.3 (phases open simultaneously); §11.2.1 (Architecture after Decision).
C and D
C scores 1 point. The entry point is right, but it spends the entire available window on a complete current-state description, which at this scale is a multi-year exercise and the one activity guaranteed not to produce a decision-ready roadmap.
D scores 0 points. It is the classic distractor: putting the architecture work on hold and ignoring the parallel work available. It declines what the CEO asked for.
Both get the same full treatment in the papers, with their own evidence lines. That is eighty questions × four options = 320 explanations.
Buy
$39
One person. Ten papers, eighty questions, yours permanently, with corrections and revisions included. Regional pricing applies automatically in some countries.
Paper 1 is free and complete, so you can see what the papers are like first.
Studying with colleagues
$149
Up to five people at one organisation. Same ten papers, and each person keeps their own copy.
Larger group, or a training cohort: email me and we will work something out.
Preparing for OGEA-102 is usually something a few architects at the same firm do at once. Five exam vouchers cost about USD 2,000 between them, so it tends to be simpler to licence the papers for the group than to sort out five separate receipts.
Updates
The Open Group revises its Series Guides without renaming them. When a revision affects a question, I correct the paper and reissue it, and everyone who bought gets the corrected file at no charge.
That is worth knowing if you are working from a copy someone passed on to you: it will not receive corrections, and a question that was right last year may not be right at the moment you sit the exam.
Questions people ask
Is this affiliated with The Open Group?
No. These are independent practice papers. They are not accredited, endorsed or licensed by The Open Group, and no material from the standard is reproduced in them. The rationales cite sections so you can check the reasoning against your own copy.
Are these real exam questions?
No. Every scenario, option and rationale here is original work, written from the published source material to match the real exam's format and scoring. Nothing is drawn from a question bank.
What format are the files?
Self-contained HTML, one file per paper, about 95 KB each. Double-click and it opens in whatever browser you already have. No install, no internet connection needed after download, no account.
Will these guarantee I pass?
No. No practice material can. What these do is show you where your judgement differs from the examiner's, eighty times, with the reasoning spelled out each time.
Does this cover Part 1 / Foundation?
No. These are Part 2 only, the scenario-based Practitioner exam.