How do you define and communicate the technical architecture of a project?

Understanding the requirements is crucial for the success of any project. It involves gathering and analyzing the needs, goals, and constraints of stakeholders, including clients, end-users, and team members. By understanding the requirements, you can ensure that the project meets its objectives, delivers value to stakeholders, and aligns with business goals. It also helps in making informed decisions, setting realistic expectations, and managing risks effectively.

During requirements, knowing the long-term strategic (a.k.a future-state architecture) is also important. So that teams can begin (or know when to begin) making progress towards implementing that future state solution. Otherwise things can get messy as the design drifts way off from the desired future state. Most companies have a need to deliver something early/quickly to deliver the business value. And that can involve short-term tactical solutions which can sometimes work for a short while, but not long-term. So know your current requirements, with an idea of your future state vision.

Key aspect of tech/SI organization is to ensure that it is translating the clients’ business requirements to the most appropriate technical solution. Sounds easy…maybe it is…but try translating it back from the solution architecture to the business language that the client would like to hear and ensure that you provide them with sufficient tools to take the suitable business decisions for their business strategy.

Choosing the appropriate architecture style is critical for the success of a project. It involves selecting the best-suited architectural pattern to meet the project's requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, and performance. Common architecture styles include monolithic, microservices, serverless, and event-driven. Each style has its own advantages and trade-offs, and the choice depends on factors like the project's complexity, team's expertise, and future scalability needs. By choosing the right architecture style, you can ensure that the project is well-structured, scalable, and meets the desired performance goals.

understand the project's structure, dependencies, and how the various parts of the system work together. It involves identifying the key components of the project, such as databases, APIs, servers, and client applications, and defining the roles and responsibilities of each component. It also involves defining how these components interact with each other, including how data flows through the system, how components communicate with each other, and how they support business processes. By clearly defining the components and interactions of a project's technical architecture, you can ensure that all stakeholders have a clear understanding of the project's structure and how it supports business goals.

When selecting technologies and tools for a project, it's essential to evaluate their suitability, compatibility, and availability. Technologies, such as Java or AWS, provide the functionality and standards for your system, while tools, like IDEs or CI/CD pipelines, support its development, testing, deployment, and monitoring. By choosing the right technologies and tools, you can ensure that your project is efficient, scalable, and aligned with your business goals.

When you’re coming to choose tools please consider the following high level criteria: - Fit for purpose – are you building POC or a full scale enterprise solution? - Skills and availability -inhouse and in the market - Various limitation - Who’s behind the technology and what’s their investment in further improvements - Scaling - Data considerations - Integration considerations - IP development and ownership - Ability to upgrade There are many more and every circumstance requires specific and different set.

Communication of the tech architecture should consider: - Reflection of the key goals and KPIs set by the client/stakeholders community - Cyber security consideration - Ability to execute and deliver - Scalability, flexibility and robustness - Upgradability - Future changes and version management - IP - Time to Market - Testing and automation - CI/CD At the end of the day solution should be delivered on time, quality and budget and the tech architecture is the foundations to achieve it

I have had tremendous success in this space by creating a "technology vision" presentation within PPT. The goal of this is to speak to the requirements, stories, technology, and implementation in very simple terms. The key to this is to break down (or summarize; depending on the complexity) the initiative into components that make sense to the stakeholders using language that is easy to follow for any audience. For example: Initiative: Use "AI" as a to determine the optimal flow of material. Vision: FIRST speak to the human interaction, what they see and a roll-up (again in simple terms) of what the system is evaluating. Have deeper backup slides, but for the sake of the stakeholder, keep the vision focused on tangible elements ...

Align architecture with organizational structure (Conway's Law) Plan for evolutionary architecture, design for replaceability Practice continuous architecture - evolve decisions as you learn Automate compliance with architecture principles/standards (e.g. via fitness functions, chaos engineering) Foster an architecture guild/chapter to share knowledge and best practices across teams Conduct regular architecture reviews to identify risks, improvements, and simplifications