Tough crowd: architecting in a shadow of a challenged project

The human feelings is a decision making variable that software architects must consider when architecting or more importantly – when strategizing a software system. This is especially important in environments where users have technology based scars.

Situation: Users had (or still have) a bad experience with implementation, deployment, and support of an enterprise grade solution. The system was adopted by a large (7000 people) organization through a mandate – people use it on a daily basis because they are forced. This brute force approach has done a tremendous damage to users’ trust and any new IT investment will be severely challenged.

Potential solution

1. Recognize the pain your future users are feeling right now. Study the situation and learn their existing environment. Understand the challenges of that system – you may face them as well.

2. Clearly understand the business problem you will solve with a software solution. You must, absolutely must, get different perspectives on the problem from a full range of stakeholders – from executive owners to the solution end users. You must be convinced that this solution will solve a business problem.

3. Go an extra mile when documenting the quality attributes of the system to demonstrate through scenarios how your system will not have the frustrating elements of the existing system that scarred the users’ experience. Consider paying an extended attention to the usability quality attributes.

4. Architect your solution so that initial implementation steps can demonstrate progress early. Create a special view of the architecture (an abstract component connector view will work well) targeting your non-technical user base.

5. When possible consider using software you can configure (e.g. COTS packages) to show progress early and often.

6. Conduct demos to the right audiences: the user base influencers. Demonstrate through actions how your approach to architecting and implementing is different than the experience your users had. Especially pay attention to the pain points your users have suffered with another solution. Ask for feedback. No. Demand feedback.

7. Remember that even if you get the architecture “right” it may be implemented wrong. On project you must stay fully engaged in the implementation and monitor conformance with the architecture as if your reputation was on the line. Actually, your reputation is on the line.

In this type of a situation it may be appropriate for an architect to pay a lot of attention to the user touchable interfaces (i.e. UI) before immersing one’s attention on creating a solid skeleton of a system that captures conceptual integrity of the system.

Do you have an experience to share where human perception played a role in your architecture related thinking? Leave a comment.

Constantin K.
Firebrand Architect™
www.SoftwareArchitectures.com

Criteria For Failure

Every project team asks themselves, implicitly or explicitly, what are our criteria for success? Depending on the range of the stakeholders involved you’ll get answers from the superficial (e.g. “users of all skill level can use software”) to the goal oriented (e.g. “identify the safest and most viable customers who need car insurance”). It’s easy to talk about success – especially non-quantifiable success.

The Firebrand Architect philosophy encourages you take a step further and pose a question: “What are our criteria for failure?” In other words – when we look back a year from now how would we know for sure we have failed to achieve our objective? Depending on your relationship with the group of the stakeholders you may have to be diplomatic as to how you pose the question.

Let’s work through an example. A project aims at providing insight into the inventory stored in many warehouses. The goal is to keep the inventory as low as possible while providing quick response to product demand. This project has a budget of $2,000,000 and will require a purchase of expensive COTS software ($500,000). A team of stakeholders will let the technical team decide which of the vendors to select, but know that a mature COTS software package has solved a similar problem in other organizations.

A year goes by, hardware has been purchased, COTS software installed and linked to a data warehouse, insight for a few categories of inventory can be obtained. Is this project a success or a failure?

One may say that since the software has been installed and connected to a data source in the production environment it’s a success. If that’s the only claim to fame, then this project is a failure. It doesn’t produce the insight that a business needs.

Using the same example as above, if a project produces some level of insight, but not all what was envisioned was it a failure or success? This is a harder question. If the paradigm and the model of operation through which the limited insight has been developed can be naturally expanded to gain insight in all envisioned categories, then the project is a success despite not delivering everything what was planned. If the paradigm doesn’t scale to cover additional level of insight, then the project is a failure.

Knowing the definition of success is important. Knowing the definition of failure is paramount.

Constantin K.
Firebrand Architect™
www.SoftwareArchitectures.com

Architects need to improve their written communication skills

Effective written communication skills are essential for every software architect. Expressing your ideas clearly, tersely, and effectively is paramount. If your audience does not fully understands your vision or design, then you’ll have to build (and probably fund) the system yourself. It is your responsibility, as the architect, to ensure that your readers understand your ideas.

Written communication is important, because that’s the only effective way to communicate with a large number of people who may be geographically distributed across the world in different time zones. A single software architecture design package is often the source of reference for hundreds of people on a large scale system or a system of systems.

The international software engineering community recognizes English language is the standard language for cross cultural communication. Therefore it is paramount for any software architect to improve their skill set of the written English. Improving written English is probably even more important than improving oral English.

There might be many guidebooks for improving your writing, but my colleague and scholar of the English language recommended only one book: “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk. The book has been in print for a few decades. It is available in the original edition, the illustrated hard cover edition (my copy), and the fourth edition. The content is about the same across all of the editions. This book is a definitive reference guide for an everyday writer. The book has no prerequisites and can (and should) be used by every technical person. After using this book you will notice that your ideas are shaped more clearly and your sentences are easier to understand. This book belongs on your technical books bookshelf.