4 ms·

I've just seen a project desperately needing one. I'll have to be a bit vague in the description here. The project is migrating a lot of small interconnected

I've just seen a project desperately needing one. I'll have to be a bit vague in the description here. The project is migrating a lot of small interconnected pieces of software, each managed by its own team. None of the teams has any idea what the others are doing. There are smart people in the project, but each is on his own island. It turns out one of the pieces of software has been installed twice in 2 different locations, for decent reasons. Nobody noticed, so while migrating they were mixed up and replaced with 1 instead of 2 new versions. The resulting mess of wrong interconnections is very hard to untangle and causes all kinds of weirdness. Apart from that, no one really understands what has been delivered and what not, as nobody knows which chains of pieces are already complete. Different teams use different names for the same thing or even the same name for different things, so people don't even understand they are working on different aspects of the same thing. Recently somehow we managed for person A to configure a thing, while person B migrated it to a new server, loosing person A's changes. A solution architect should have some overview of what all the pieces are, what should be connected to what, and how the whole thing should behave.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
To me it sounds like the devs in these disparate teams need to talk more and work closer together, rather than having a person whose job is to increase the distance between them.
- hyperman1 5y ago
  While this is technically correct, the problem is one of scale and organisation. There are hundreds of people like this in the org, each responsible for one tiny brick. These people are included in dozens of projects and have a small task for each of these projects for a few weeks, then go to the next project. It is unreasonable to demand knowledge for all projects, the org is simply too big. Personally, I'd say they need a more focused organisation: Everybody on 1 project at a time, and an enterprise architecture that does not sprawl one business task over all these tiny items so meaningful work can be done in 1 team. But this would require the top to loosen control a bit and trust people under them more. To be honest, it would also require all the people at the bottom to be more trustworthy and think about more than their own tiny world. Trust relations in both directions are basically broken, the top tries to control their people like puppets, and the bottom reacts by protecting their own world against not always well though out orders from the top, no matter the impact on other people's work. Now you're talking about re-tuning the culture of a big corporation, which is very hard.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago

To me it sounds like the devs in these disparate teams need to talk more and work closer together, rather than having a person whose job is to increase the distance between them.

hyperman1 5y ago
While this is technically correct, the problem is one of scale and organisation. There are hundreds of people like this in the org, each responsible for one tiny brick. These people are included in dozens of projects and have a small task for each of these projects for a few weeks, then go to the next project. It is unreasonable to demand knowledge for all projects, the org is simply too big. Personally, I'd say they need a more focused organisation: Everybody on 1 project at a time, and an enterprise architecture that does not sprawl one business task over all these tiny items so meaningful work can be done in 1 team. But this would require the top to loosen control a bit and trust people under them more. To be honest, it would also require all the people at the bottom to be more trustworthy and think about more than their own tiny world. Trust relations in both directions are basically broken, the top tries to control their people like puppets, and the bottom reacts by protecting their own world against not always well though out orders from the top, no matter the impact on other people's work. Now you're talking about re-tuning the culture of a big corporation, which is very hard.