Role: Architect

This role leads or coordinates the technical design of the system and has overall responsibility for managing the major technical decisions expressed as software architecture. This typically includes identifying and documenting the architecturally significant aspects of the system, including requirements, design, implementation, and deployment views.

This role is also responsible for providing the rationale for these decisions, balancing the concerns of the various stakeholders, reducing technical risks, and ensuring that decisions are effectively communicated, validated, and followed.

This role is closely involved in organizing the team around the architecture by working closely with the Project Manager in staffing and planning the project.

Skills

Architects must be well-rounded people with maturity, vision, and a depth of experience that allows for grasping issues quickly and making educated, critical judgments in the absence of complete information. More specifically, the person must possess this combination of qualifications:

Experience in both problem and software engineering domains, with evidence of a thorough understanding of the requirements to solve the problem and active participation in software development. If there is a team, this experience can be represented by different team members, but at least one person must be able to provide the overall vision for the project.
Leadership ability to motivate and maintain momentum for the technical effort across the various teams and to make critical decisions under pressure, plus make those decisions stick. To be effective, this role must have the authority to make technical decisions.
Excellent communication skills to earn trust, persuade, motivate, and mentor.This role cannot lead by decree, but only by the consent of the rest of the project team. To be effective, this person must earn the respect of the team members, the Project Manager, the customer, and the user community, as well as the management team.
Goal-oriented and proactive orientation with a relentless focus on results. This person is the technical driving force behind the project, not a visionary or dreamer. The career of a successful architect is a long series of sub-optimal decisions made in uncertainty and under pressure. Only those who can focus on doing what needs to be done will be successful.

From an expertise standpoint, this role also needs to show both design and implementation abilities. However, from the design perspective, the effective architect typically exhibits these traits:

Tends to be a generalist, rather than a specialist, who knows many technologies at a high level rather than a few technologies at the detail level
Makes the broader technical decisions, thereby demonstrating broad knowledge and experience, as well as communication and leadership skills

"The ideal architect should be a person of letters, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations." — Vitruvius, circa 25 BC

Assignment Approaches

This person in this role should be engaged in the project from start to finish.

For smaller projects, a single person may act as both architect and Project Manager. However, if possible, it is better to have these roles performed by different people to ensure that time pressure in one role doesn't cause neglect of the other role. If you adopt this separate-role approach, both individuals must make sure that they work together closely.

If the project is large enough to warrant an architecture team, the goal is to have a good mix of talents that covers a broad spectrum of experience and share a common understanding of software engineering process. The architecture team should not be a committee of representatives from various teams, domains, or contractors. Software architecture is a full-time function, with staff permanently dedicated to it.