Design By Crowd

Traditionally, Architects work on the end-to-end design and get it reviewed by different stakeholders at the end. You end up waiting several days to get this reviewed by many people in your organization and your customers’ organization. It is clearly a serial activity and waterfall model. In the era of the Public Cloud and agile world, I think we should also change our approach slightly to speed up the process and modernize our design process.

The world is pushing for Cloud Speed. When you design the Public Cloud infrastructure for your customers, you must travel along. Most of the organizations are shaping their organizational structures to pool different skills sets and work as groups. So, we should also engage the different teams and their members in the different stages of your design. This will reduce conflicts and friction at the end of your design because you are taking their inputs. You may even invite others to update some sections of the design guide, which will bring lots of collaboration to the design.

It is a good idea to do several draft reviews with the team and customers. This will reduce re-works at the end as you get instant feedback on your existing content. When your high-level diagram is ready, send to stakeholders, including customer saying ” Hey, take a look what I am currently working on.” This will avoid you creating content that may be incorrect for a specific requirement. You can even think about reviewing a completed section with them, and you work on other sections while you receive the feedback. With this approach, you need to get a sign-off from the stakeholder on the final version, and that will be easier as they are already familiar with your content.

Another advantage of engaging others teams, it would help the organization to grow good Architects. Junior members in the team will get the opportunity to work with senior Architects and also contribute to the design process. This will create a pool of resources that can be a good Architect in the future.

I hope this helps and welcome your feedback.