The Path to Great Relationships Part #7. Architect and Project Manager
Many project managers aspire to involve professionals with many years of experience in their projects as it supposedly brings expertise, quality, and speed to development. However, 90% of the resource performance depends on the manager. Knowing the right approach can help you deal with all levels of seniority. This article will discuss how to staff, manage and promote Architect positions, keep senior associates engaged, and maximize their efficiency.
I’ll introduce myself to you. I’m Kateryna, and I am a SoftServe Project Manager. I wrote this material based on my experience counts 3+ years in healthcare, e-commerce, and fintech domains. I was inspired by the fantastic series of articles on building relationships with different project roles. We hope that you’ll find this valuable for your day-to-day life.
#1 Responsibilities of the Architect position
Myth: the Architect is the most competent person on the project; they are superior in development and architecture planning.
Truth: The Architect is preferred to have a development background, but it’s not mandatory. The purpose of the position is to compose the platform’s architecture according to best practices, manage stakeholders, and conduct pre-sales. This is a very high-level job in terms of development. Usually, the Lead position is the one who chooses technologies and develops the system.
These two positions are as different as the Project Manager and Product Owner; they understand the project but perform different functions.
#2 How do you stuff the right person on your project?
The first ground rule for every job level is paying attention to red flags during the interview process. Notice whether the candidate has the camera turned on or how they speak about their current working environment. Ask open questions to know the candidate’s outlook on career perspectives, peer relationships, and company structure, then decide whether it aligns with expectations for the role.
For soft skills check, situational questions work best as they allow candidates to show their wealth of experience and decision-making skills while describing how they would act in a particular situation. Here are a few ideas for such types of questions:
- Tell me about when you had to cultivate a relationship with a new client. What did you do?
- Describe a time when you disagreed with your team members. What did you do?
- What was your greatest Accomplishment?
Architect positions require a high level of responsibility, including engagement of new clients, coaching and mentoring, process adjustments, and advisory. Therefore, well-developed soft skills are a must-have for this role.
As for the hard skills, the technical interviewer should preferably be at least 1 grade higher than the candidate. In such cases, they will be able to properly assess the candidate’s knowledge of the theory and experience in the subject and decide whether he/she is the right fit. Before the meeting, ask your technical interviewer to check whether the candidate can explain the logic behind his architectural decisions. Stakeholders management is one of the impact areas for Architects. One should persuade the upper management and technical team from the client’s side that the proposed solution is the best option for them.
If you are hiring internally, a good idea would be to check in with the associate’s previous managers on his/hers performance and work style. Sometimes, a second opinion can give you many beneficial insights.
#3 Management styles
How to manage a person that seems to know everything? How do you think you could give them feedback? How to motivate and keep them engaged?
Managers can do a lot in terms of increasing a person’s performance or motivation. One of the most popular and widely used approaches is called Situational Management. This technique allows managers to implement different managerial styles based on their associates’ level of experience and emotional state.
In the image below, you can see the chart that represents four common types of associates. When we are talking about Architect positions, there can be two gradations:
Experienced and fulfilled
Empower this type of people by giving them the freedom to perform their assigned tasks. Give them as much responsibility as possible and ask only to keep you posted on the progress. Show them your trust and support. For this type of associate, the collaborative management model is the best option to keep them engaged.
Experienced and demotivated
Here are a couple of options on how to improve the situation:
- Try to ask associates about their ideas, try to implement them, and provide feedback;
- Ask them for consultancy on various topics;
- Make them decision-makers in some areas of the project and give them ownership;
- Involve them in the planning process and ask for their input;
- Give them a challenge;
- Suggest they try themselves as a mentor for other associates.
- Generally, you should involve them in the processes as much as possible and make them feel important.
Regarding feedback, the general rule is to praise in front of others and give negative feedback only in private. Here is the way to deliver the second type of feedback:
- Schedule monthly 1:1 meetings (they are helpful not only for the feedback);
- At the meeting, describe the situation and alarmed you and ask your associate to provide his/hers viewpoint on this;
- Then provide how you’ve seen it and why you found it disturbing;
- Decide together how you can avoid similar cases in the future;
- Thank the associate for the collaboration.
Remember to keep calm during the meeting and be empathetic. Usually, no people mean harm, and even experienced professionals make mistakes. After all, we are all humans.
#4 Career development for Architect positions
What are the career perspectives for Architect positions? What are the promotion criteria? How to guide your candidate to promotion?
In SoftServe, we have a unique, clear, and non-biased system for people’s career growth, allowing any associate to know his career perspectives within the company. There are five levels of Architect position:
- Associate Technical Architect, the entry-level position. Usually, Associate Technical Architects have a 3-month probation before being promoted to the Technical Architect Position; this applies to internally and externally hired candidates. During this time, their responsibilities are the same as those of Technical Architects.
- Technical Architect usually contributes most of their time to long-term architectural project support, can also participate in engagements and consulting services such as discoveries and assessments, and can mentor the developers and technical leaders.
- Solutions Architect works across a few technical profiles and can build completed architecture solutions. The associate also has basic managerial knowledge and experience. He/she drives or participates in engagements and consulting services such as discoveries and assessments for accounts and projects of any size.
- Senior Solutions Architect has substantial managerial knowledge and experience. He/she drives highly critical and highly ranked engagements and consulting services such as discoveries and assessments, frequently working across technical profiles, oversees and controls other architects and architect groups, works directly with chief architects on architecture for large and strategical solutions, identifies new high-profile opportunities for the company, represents and markets the company’s architecture expertise on the top-level technical and business events makes significant contributions to the company’s architectural methodology and competence development.
- The Principal Solutions Architect is sufficiently mature to drive consulting critical to the company, strategic directions in technology, corporate methodology, and competence development. Works directly with the client’s C-level stakeholders.
The entry requirements to become an architect are having 5+ years of domain experience and at least six months of leadership experience. Before being promoted to Architect, the associate should also get acquired with the Architectural ramp-up program developed especially for SoftServe’s associates.
Last but not the least
If you are a manager, before discussing promotion with the Architect or to the Architect position, ensure that the associate is aware of the role description and his/hers career options. Also, make sure that you know the requirements well and will be able to guide the associate through this process. Remember that promotion between architecture titles occurs linearly without the possibility of jumping over the position. For example, if the candidate is an Associate Technical Architect, he/she cannot be promoted to a Solutions Architect position without prior promotion to Technical Architect.
Thank you for reading this far! I hope you enjoyed the article 😊 In case you have any questions or want to start a topic-related discussion, please, leave a comment or write to kkasiu@softserveinc.com
Check other articles from this series on following the path to great relationships:
