Being a Solution Architect: Working with Dev Team

As a solution architect, I should work with different type of people and lots of different teams to get the things done. In general, a solution architect works with his software development team very closely, and they need to collaborate each other day to day. In this article, I’d like to share my ideas about how to work with dev team so that both parties can work happily and deliver the things that are expected.

I divided the topic in ten sub-groups, and I am going over them one by one. These are:

1. Promoting Cross-Functional Collaboration
2. Setting Clear Roles and Responsibilities
3. Encouraging Open Communication
4. Facilitating Knowledge Sharing
5. Leading by Example
6. Promoting Agile Practices
7. Creating a Safe Environment for Innovation
8. Focusing on the Big Picture
9. Empowering Decision-making
10. Ensuring Transparency

Promoting Cross-Functional Collaboration

By the nature of our work and the job’s responsibility, we should closely work with lots of different teams. These teams can be technical and non-technical. What we need to do is make sure that everyone is on track and understand each other to get the things done. To achieve this goal, we need to align with all parties and identified their goals and concerns.

Suggestions:

• Encouraging interdisciplinary teamwork: We must ensure that developers, testers, designers and operations work together throughout the development process. We must use cross-functional teams to break down silos.
• Holding regular cross-team syncs: We should organize sessions where teams can share their updates, discuss challenges, and learn from each other.
• Involving the team in architecture decisions: Instead of working in isolation, we should bring developers into the architectural process and let them be participating in the decision making process. This empowers them and ensures that solutions are feasible and aligned with the team’s skill set.

Setting Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Setting clear roles and responsibilities is essential for any solution architect who wants to build a collaborative culture and create an open communicative environment. By setting clear roles and responsibilities, it allows us to build a structured, efficient, and accountable team. It enhances our collaboration, improves our communication, ensures our accountability, and optimize our resources, leading to higher-quality solutions and smoother project execution. This clarity is critical for ensuring that the solution architecture aligns with business objectives and is delivered on time and within budget.

Suggestions:

• Defining clear ownership: We must ensure that each team member knows their role and how it ties into the bigger picture. To be able to do that, we should closely work with Dev Lead. To make this clear, we can use RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) metric.
• Encouraging shared responsibility: While roles should be clear, we should encourage our team members to feel ownership over the entire project’s success, not just their portion.

Encouraging Open Communication

According to the statistics, most of the projects are failed because of lack of communication. If we do not communicate clearly to each other, then we cannot see the problems that may arise and at the end we probably face with unsuccessful delivery. To avoid this issue and mitigate it, we should apply below suggestions.

Suggestions:

• Creating a feedback-rich environment: Implementing regular retrospectives and encouraging both positive and constructive feedback would help us a lot. We should promote open dialogue where everyone feels comfortable sharing your thoughts, in this way we can learn from our mistakes and create positive work environment.
• Using collaboration tools effectively: Most of our time spent on communication processes. Thus, we should implement and encourage the use of communication platforms (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams) and project management tools (e.g., Jira, Trello) to enhance transparency and communication. Keep in mind, not everyone has the same communication style, to be able to make use of these approaches, we should learn our own communication style.
• Promoting face-to-face (or virtual) meetings: We should encourage the use of daily stand-ups, planning sessions, and design reviews to keep communication flowing and allow for real-time problem solving. If these meetings are online, then opening a camera on would increase the team belonging feeling.

Facilitating Knowledge Sharing

One of the main issues in team dynamics is siloing. To mitigate it and foster collaborative environment and enhance team knowledge with broaden perspective, we should apply below suggestions.

Suggestions:

• Encouraging pair programming and code reviews: Pair programming fosters collaboration by having two people work on the same task, leading to knowledge transfer and reduce the silo effect.
• Implementing ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions: These sessions are informal sessions where all team members can present on topics of interest, share new technologies, or discuss architectural designs.
• Maintaining a knowledge base: To accomplish that, we should start doing documentation and create a document repository or wiki where the team can store key learnings, design decisions, and important processes. This fosters shared understanding.

Leading by Example

As a solution architect, I am assuming that our background comes from technical side, either software developer and system architect or similar discipline. Which means, we already know that how to jump into the topic. If it is necessary, we should roll our sleeves up and start doing things. With this way, we do not only show our ability, we are helping the team to learn from us. We should not become the person who always tell people how to do things but in general no idea about it. We should lead by example always.

Suggestions:

• Demonstrating collaborative behavior: We should actively involve ourselves in discussions, be approachable, and show a willingness to listen. Model open communication, trust, and inclusivity in all interactions. Don’t be an ivory tower architect.
• Mentoring and guidance: We should provide guidance where needed, helping the team solve problems without dictating the solution. We should encourage autonomy while being available support all the time, hence team will know that if they need help they can reach out to us any time without any hesitation.

Promoting Agile Practices

Agile is one of the most used way of working method in nowadays environment. If we’re working in an Agile environment, then we should do it properly.

Suggestions:

• Adopting agile methodologies: Agile encourages collaboration through regular iterations, retrospectives, and a continuous feedback loop. What we need to do is that following best practices how to apply agile in our team and let the team grow themselves.
• Fostering collaborative backlog refinement: We must ensure that everyone participates in backlog grooming and planning sessions. To achieve that we need to closely coordinate our product owner and scrum master. This approach builds collective understanding and agreement on priorities.
• Ensuring regular retrospectives: We should use retrospectives to discuss not only technical aspects of the project but also the collaboration and communication dynamics of the team.

Creating a Safe Environment for Innovation

Not everyone knows everything, that’s why we should create an environment that everyone can share their ideas without no fear.

Suggestions:

• Promoting psychological safety: We should create an environment where team members feel safe to take risks, ask questions, and suggest ideas without fear of criticism of failure. To create such as environment, we should closely work with leadership team and make sure that necessary steps are taken.
• Encouraging experimentation: We should allow space for developers to explore new technologies, techniques, and tools. A ‘fail-fast’ mindset fan lead us to breakthroughs in innovation and problem solving.
• Celebrating small wins: We should recognize achievements, whether it is a solved issue or a successful experiment, and celebrate them. This builds morale and fosters a culture of continuous improvement. To achieve this goal, we should closely work with leadership team and we need to make sure that our work is visible for everyone.

Focusing on the Big Picture

Focusing on the big picture is crucial for any solution architect because it ensures that the architecture that we design aligns with the our organization’s broader goals, while also providing a holistic and sustainable solution. It helps manage complexity, reduce risks, ensure cross-functional integration, and optimize resources, ultimately creating architectures that serve the business today and in the future.

Suggestions:

• Aligning on business goals: We must ensure that team understands the business needs and objectives and how their work contributes to them. This alignment helps the team stay focused on shared goals. After all, it is our main responsibility: to fill the gap between businesses and IT.
• Facilitating open discussions and trade-off: When architectural decisions are made, we should discuss the trade-offs openly with our team, considering scalability, security, and performance, so that they understand the reasoning behind choice.

Empowering decision making

Empowering decision-making is crucial for us because it directly influences the efficiency, scalability, and success of the solutions that we design and implement. If we employ empowering decision making processes, then we get results in faster with more efficient solutions, better risk management, and greater alignment with business goals. It enhances our ability to deliver high-quality, scalable architectures that drive long-term success for the our organization.

Suggestions:

• Delegating authority: We should give the team members the autonomy to make decisions within their domain. Allowing then to take ownership encourages initiative and increases engagement. Also with this approach, they are more accountable about what they’re doing.
• Encouraging problem solving as a team: When issues arise, we should resist the urge to solve everything ourselves. Instead, we should facilitate problem solving discussions to promote team-driven solutions. In this way, team can learn how to get rid of issues by themselves. However, we should always consider the importance of the issue is and urgency of it. If it requires immediate attention, then we should take an action immediately, and then explain what was the issue to the team and what were the actions to mitigate the issue.

Ensuring Transparency

Transparency in solution architecture leads to better decision-making, risk reduction, smoother collaboration, and increased trust. All of which are key to successful project outcomes.

Suggestions:

• Making architecture visible: We must share architectural diagrams, technical roadmaps, and system blueprints with the entire team. This ensures everyone understands how their work fits into the broader technical landscape.
• Being transparent about challenges: When problems arise, we should be open about them. Collaborating on solving these issues as a team builds trust and encourages collective ownership. By implementing these strategies, we can foster a collaborative culture that improves team morale, innovation, and productivity.

Summary

As a solution architect, our influence in guiding not just the technical but also interpersonal dynamics of the team is critical. If we want to become really good solution architect, then we must find a way to help our development team growing.