Communication

From my observations this is one of the most underestimated skill. If you are brilliant in design but cannot communicate your ideas, your thoughts are likely to have less impact or even fail to succeed.

• Learn how to communicate your ideas: When collaborating on a board or flip chart, it is essential to know how to use it properly in order to structure you and your peers’ thoughts. I found the book “UZMO — Thinking With Your Pen” to be a good resource to enhance my skills in this area. As an architect you usually do not only participating in a meeting, usually you need to drive the meeting and to moderate it.
• Give talks to large groups: Presenting your ideas to a small or large group should be doable for you. If you feel uncomfortable with this, start presenting to your best friend. Enlarge the group slowly. This is something which you can only learn by doing and by leaving your personal comfort zone. Be patient with yourself, this process may take some time.
• Find the right level of communication: Different stakeholders have different interests and views. They need to be addressed individually on their level. Before you communicate, step back and check if the information you want to share have the right level, regarding abstractness, content, goals, motivations, etc. Example: A developer is usually interested in the very little detail of the solution, whereas a manager prefers to know which option saves most money.
• Communicate often: A brilliant architecture is worthless if nobody knows about it. Distribute the target architecture and the thoughts behind it, regularly and on every organizational level. Schedule meetings with developers, architects and managers to show them the desired or defined way.
• Be transparent: Regular communication mitigates missing transparency only partially. You need to make the reason behind decisions transparent. Especially, if people are not involved in the decision-making process it is hard to understand and to follow the decision and rationale behind it.
• Be always prepared to give a presentation: There is always someone with questions and you want to give the right answers immediately. Try to always have the most important slides in a consolidated set which you can show and explain. It saves you a lot of time and it gives security to yourself.