Comments on: Money?! Schedule?! But I’m an architect, not a PM!

By: JF

JF — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:49:05 +0000

I agree with you. I noticed that on some projects that indeed the project managers needed me (the architect) all the time to define their schedule, estimations (time & costs) and deliverables. Than you get used to it.

Sometimes I was wondering why a Project Manager was there.

The best collaborations I had were when the Project Manager manages the team and the customer in order to deliver what the Architect has in mind (because even when you document fully your architecture, people don’t read it. So you have to talk to each of them and coach them on what page of the design document they should read).

Therefore a very close collaboration is needed. (When you have coached you project manager very well, the burden becomes nearly 0).

By: Frank Kelly

Frank Kelly — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:43:37 +0000

Hi Udi,

Thought you might find the following blog entry of interest http://softarc.blogspot.com/2007/01/conflict-architects-vs-project-managers.html

Basically the same topic – same basic conclusion.

-Frank

By: João Pedro Martins

João Pedro Martins — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:14:50 +0000

Hello Udi.

I was one of the people suposedly with “shock in my face”. This is my oppinion:

First, the goal of the competition was to “[..] design a solution and infrastructure architecture that will address the problem, requirements and assumptions stated above for presentation to the organizing committee of Tech-Ed: Developers consisting of business people and senior technical architects. [..]”
It was not to say how long/much it would cost to develop the solution.

Second, my personal experience as a Developer obviously allows me to make a first estimate as to effort, but I *always* validate that with my Dev Teams, especially if using something like Scrum. It’s not “up the PM”, IMHO, even if PM’s end up doing the micro-management, not architects.

Third, related to the “super-man” assumption: I can’t say how much it would take to develop the project “off the top of my head” (which was what you asked), but you definetly do not need to be a superman to develop what was asked in a short time frame. I would like to see your estimate, if you have one.

Finally, I agree with you when say that “Architects need to be the glue that connect everything together – business, management, technical, test, operations, etc.” Being the glue does not me mean being the best at any of those, but being the best at being the glue.

João Martins

By: Jacob

Jacob — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 10:18:27 +0000

Have to agree with you here. Architects need to become *much* more comfortable in the realm of business evaluation because their decisions have a direct impact on important business realities. Architecture has too many impact points on a business for architects to remain wilfully ignorant of the complete development life-cycle and all it entails. Requirements, testing and deployment are often pushed off on the PM as irrelevant. While it may be true that other people in the organization fulfill those functions, a competent architect needs to be aware of them and what it takes for them to work well.