Courses - Role of the Architect Workshop

The Role of the Architect Workshop (by Bredemeyer Consulting)

What it takes to be great
 

Background
More and more organizations are creating the role of architect, recognizing that creating and deploying an architecture demands special talents and focus. Though this is a new field, we have been working with and studying world-class system and software architects for a number of years. Based on this experience, we have identified a number of critical domains within which the architect works.

Clearly, the role has a core technical aspect to it, but this is only sufficient to create a good architecture. To create the right architecture, the architect also needs a good sense of strategy; understanding business strategy and being able to translate that into a compelling technical strategy. And that is not sufficient to ensure that the architecture is successful. First, it requires organizational politics to gain and sustain the support of the management community throughout the architecture’s creation and deployment to the developers. In addition, to ensure the architecture doesn’t simply gather dust on the engineers’ bookshelves, architects need to act as consultants to the engineering community, helping them to understand the architecture and the rationale behind it. Lastly, architects need to be strong leaders, aligning the organization behind a powerful vision that motivates and guides.
 

Benefits
As an architect, you pursue excellence. You demand it of yourself and of your architecture, and you place correspondingly high demands on your organization. This class helps you chart your path to excellence, and take key steps along it.

You will work on essential architecting skills, including:

  • leadership skills such as creating and communicating an architectural vision;
  • consulting skills such as interviewing architecture stakeholders, leading architecture reviews, and taking criticism constructively;
  • political awareness building such as understanding organizational networks and influencing; and
  • strategy skills such as building technology roadmaps and scenario analysis.

We also go into innovation, system thinking, and other areas that challenge you to new heights in the technology domain.

Target Audience
Enterprise architects, system architects, software architects, process architects, and managers of architecture projects.

Format
In the workshop, we will develop a model of the role, responsibilities and skills of an architect. We share stories from our real-world experience, and throughout the workshop we help you to build skills with experiential exercises. This is an integrated workshop covering strategy, leadership, organizational dynamics/politics, consulting, system thinking, visualization, etc. from the perspective of architects. The alternative would be individual classes on these topics and that's a lot of courses! Or a lot of books to read. The technical aspects of the architect role, such as system and requirements modeling are introduced in this workshop, but covered in depth in the Software Architecture Workshop.

The Role of the Architect workshop addresses such questions as:

  • What skills do I need? Where should I focus my personal development?
  • What have others learned in creating architectures? What works? What does not?
  • What should we do to make our architecture successful?
  • What should we communicate, to whom?

This class covers topics addressed in the report we wrote for Cutter Consortium's EA Executive Report series, and more. See Cutter's site at http://www.cutter.com/offers/greatarchitect.html to download the report.

Content

This 4-day workshop covers the following topics:

Introduction to the Role of the Architect

  • Architecting pitfalls and critical success factors
  • The architecting process
  • The role of the Architect

Consulting

  • Architect as consultant
  • Interviewing Architecture Stakeholders
  • Analyzing and synthesizing input
  • Facilitation and the art of leading team processes
  • Leading Architecture Reviews
  • Taking criticism

Leadership

  • Architect as leader
  • Stories and leadership
  • How to create and sell an Architectural Vision

Strategy

  • Architect as strategist
  • Context Maps
  • Technology Roadmaps
  • Scenario Analysis

Organizational Politics

  • Architect as organizational politician
  • Organizational networks and influence
  • Building an Architecture Communication Plan

Technical

  • Architect as technical lead
  • Views, modeling and visualization
  • Creativity tools and innovation

The 1-day version of the class covers much the same topics, but has fewer exercises and covers less of the concepts, models and techniques. It is a good companion to the 4-day Software Architecture Workshop, but can be taken on its own.
 

Instructors
This workshop is provided by Bredemeyer Consulting ( http://www.bredemeyer.com/ )
Instructors will be either Dana Bredemeyer or Ruth Malan

ABOUT BREDEMEYER CONSULTING
Bredemeyer Consulting specializes in training and mentoring software architects. We typically work with architecture teams, providing training and mentoring to accelerate their creation or migration of an architecture.
 

Number of participants
Minimum: 12
Maximum: 16
 
Dates & location
Dates for this 4-day workshop will be scheduled when at least 12 participants have subscribed.
Workshop hours are from 9:00 AM until 5:00 PM  (subject to change)

Location: Embedded Systems Institute, TU/e Campus, Laplace-building 0.10 Den Dolech 2, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
 

Costs (excl. VAT)
€ 2.150,- per person

Note that costs are for the timeframe from January 2010 to July 2010.

Registration form

Click here to find the registration form.