Imaging for a second you can get any help you want, what type of help do you need for your project?
Project
Of course, we need a project. Though obvious, decent amount of details need to be presented before meaningful architect, or right architect so to speak. You have limited market share to capture, you have limited budget to spend, you have limited resources to work for you. Moreover you get limited expansion power, for instance, your imagination (or time, or business requirement) might dry out sooner than you think.
In short, you need some historical context to sink in before start, the heavier this context, the longer you might be able to stay on it, thus the higher chance the team might survive. Yes, don’t under-estimate the willingness.
Architect
This isn’t very obvious, because everyone holds opinionated view on how the project should be architected, and in the end no matter what you can still have one, let it be good or bad or ok.
However, based on your experience in your field, and the guts feeling that you know about the world, you might want to see if there’s something out there can help you avoid problems that you had in your past/current project.
In case you like one out there, it’s not easy if you would like to try something that you never use before. Maybe that architect is as good as it sounds, maybe it is very expensive, maybe it doesn’t apply to your project, maybe no one can operate on it, maybe it jeopardizes other part of the system. There’s many maybe(s), and the risk of adopting it won’t stop at the decision of adoption, it’ll normally carry through the entire project cycle.
More or less like a marriage. The issue doesn’t show up on the front, and doesn’t show up every day. And most of time it’s sweet, hopefully.
In short, you need some expert or someone who had experience on this new architect which can be available throughout the cycle of the project. He can educate some basic, and share some experience, and provide some preliminary boilerplate to speed up the process. Moreover if he can be still around, he can debug the problem at the right time.
Architect issue always seem to be urgent to solve. But it always ends up with not solved or solved after more than six month. Otherwise it won’t be called an architect issue. For instance you forget to build a pipeline to a bathroom after it’s delivered.
Execution
Don’t get me wrong, whoever is running the daily job supposed to get the credit. Simply because there’s a lot of work to be done, most of time, tedious, time-consuming and full of weird business logic required by the real business and human factor around it. If you are doing the job, congratulations you sign up for the job.
Your job is to be considerate to accommodate your needs within the architect as much as possible, as comfortable as possible, and the same time, do anything making sense to you towards the architect, for instance, try not to abuse the architect beyond certain limit. Yeah, there’s a limit for everything.
At the same time, you need to be mindful to collect problems of the current architect. Starting with writing them done, trust me, solving it might or might not be your thing, but please writing them done. And review it subconsciously every once a while. This helps to prioritize future work in terms of how much resources should be spent on improving the current system. The less resource the better, but “enough” amount of resource need to be spent if the architect problem turns up to be BIG.
What are big issues? It’s very subjective. For instance, it prevents you doing your current job efficiently, it prevents you making more customers, it prevents you working with more teams. Anything that prevents you to scale up, to me, is relatively more important than the style of how you write particular line.
Big is subjective, you should try to be mindful measuring the size, simply because you don’t want to fall into the trap of local minimization too early. Making one minor aspect of your life better might not be worth it at all. Ditch that idea early, and move on.
In short, the execution should lean more towards more healthier, bigger, and more sustainable business. With that goal in mind, you keep a memo of the good and bad of the architect while wiggling your way through. Yes like a worm.
