Antwerp, Belgium
A few weeks ago I walked into a meeting room to discuss my solution to a fork in the road problem. We’ve been roadblocked for two weeks with two clear paths forward. One of them I preferred; a bit more work, but it would bring dividends in the future and not burden us with a less than ideal solution. The other way forward was what a different group wanted: to push the project through so they could reach the deadline.
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Architects always get a bad rap when it comes to design documents.
We get blamed for delivering these massive solution design documents that take weeks to produce, eat into the time for development and in the end result into an encyclopedia that nobody reads.
The architectural drive to document and cover as much as possible naturally evolves into templates that are in the 40–50 pages (template alone).
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Every time I go to teams and start talking about process mapping and standard operating procedures (SOP) I notice an undeniable amount of unease like it just got a few degrees colder.
What people hear isn’t “we’re here to understand your work and make it smoother.”
What they really hear is: “We’re here to judge, strip the creativity, maybe even replace you with a machine.”
In my startup days, we often had these dead marches where we had to implement a massive new feature in time before some kind of trade show happened. We worked long hours and even weekends to make it happen so the boss and a project manager could go to Vegas for the trade show.
When they came back on Monday, they told us what the competition was doing, and laid out a brand-new strategy they’d dreamed up between hotel bars and expo booths.
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I’ve been working a lot with service line architecture recently. If you’re not familiar with that; it’s how business units such as IT, HR, or Sales bring services to clients, both internal and external. These structures often mirror team organization.
Think of it as a hierarchy: IT at level one, Software Development and Ops at level two, and then individual teams, like: Software Team X or Ops Team Y, at level three.1
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In every organization I’ve worked with, there’s always been a handful of core applications, central, timeworn systems that quietly hold the business together.
Knowledge of these systems often lives in the heads of a few long-tenured experts and is usually passed on through informal, almost ritualistic projects where newer employees are slowly initiated into their mysteries.
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One of my mentors, Steven Caus, always taught me the concept of “the question behind the question”: The question we receive is not always the problem we need to solve.
The concept is very easy. When someone comes to you with a question to do something, instead of blindly doing the ask, take a step back and try to understand what they actually want to achieve. Often this task might actually not be the best way to achieve the goal they are set out to do.
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Some years ago I worked at a place that had, buried deep in the codebase, a service running that combed through the central data warehouse and flagged certain users. One through seven, except four.
A left over from an old proof-of-concept application that had something to do with GDPR. This field went out over the API as part of the “employee data” resource.
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Cost reduction is one of the main focuses of so many companies out there today. The market is not great, and that is the moment companies take a deep look at the financials of it all.
One of the first things that is being asked is: What are we really spending?
Not just the big hard numbers like contracts and licences, but everything. The hidden costs and invisible hours.
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It’s the start of a new fiscal year. Strategy season. That time when all the grand ideas come out and everyone is still hopefull.
Over the years, I’ve settled into a structure that helps me define projects that not only link to the strategy above but also looks at my own team’s enviroment, I thought I’d share it here.
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