IT architecture isn’t just about software and design patterns. This workshop prepares IT architects and technical leaders for a more impactful role in their organization or the organizations they consult with. They will learn how to forge a crucial connection between the IT engine room and the organization’s leadership by tackling complexity, more effectively communicating with senior management, and influencing the organization. The outcome is improved decision discipline, stronger management buy-in, and faster value delivery to the business.
Architects who can ride the Architect Elevator from the upper floors to the IT engine room are bound to be in high demand. But it’s not a skill that one can learn from reading a book or watching a few TED talks. The best method is to be mentored by a senior architect. A close second is attending a highly interactive workshop led by a former chief architect that combines lecture, discussion, exercises, and role-playing.
The workshop is based on two fundamental premises:
1) The most valuable architect is the one who can cover more levels of an organization.
2) Architects aren’t the smartest people in the team. They make everyone else smarter.
From this foundation, we’ll tackle strategy and transformation, organizations and politics, decisions and trade-offs, systemic thinking and modeling, plus effective communication in presentations, diagrams, and documents.
Upcoming workshops
- Distributed System Design: 10 Truths, Dec 2, 2024 in Paris (as part of API Days Paris)
- Riding the Architect Elevator, Jan 27/28, 2025 in London (as part of NDC London)
If you’d like me to teach a workshop at your company, please contact me via the links at the bottom of this page.
Rethinking the Role of Architects
Participants expand their role to become a connecting element across the layers of an organization. They learn how to understand the organization’s strategy and link it to technical decisions.
Influencing Organizations
Architects live in the middle of a sociotechnical system that depends on the interplay of complex technology and complex organizations, staffed with individuals that bring their own agenda and incentives. Architects can’t succeed by just tackling one side or the other, so we openly discuss how to read between the lines of an org chart and how to use organizational constraints to your advantage.
Thinking like an Architect: Systems, Models, and Metaphors
Complexity is an architect’s biggest enemy. Models and complex systems theory are needed to improve decision discipline and transparency. Metaphors help communicate decisions and trade-offs to a broader audience.
Communicating with Confidence & Content
While many training seminars focus purely on presentation style, in this workshop attendees hone their presentation and moderation techniques to engage C-level stakeholders on technical content–without watering down the message.
The workshop doesn’t depend on specific technologies. Exercises draw on typical modern architectures and methods, such as microservices, cloud automation, or DevOps.
Audience & Participant Take-aways
The workshop equips enterprise or IT architects, technical IT managers, technical program managers, and senior engineers with a good grasp of:
- the changing role of architects
- the mindset and operating model of “digital” companies
- applying architectural thinking to organizational structures
- pitching complex technical topics to an executive audience
- improving decision making with options theory and models
Participants will be able to:
- reverse-engineer an organization’s beliefs and influence them
- clearly articulate the value of architecture in times of change and uncertainty
- communicate technical topics and their merit across the organization
- tackle the complexity of large-scale systems by using models and systems thinking
- make principle-based architectural decisions
- navigate organizational politics
Format and Options
Limiting the workshop to 12-15 participants ensures maximum value for each attendee. The 2-day foundation course can be augmented with optional half-day or full-day deep-dive modules:
- Foundation: The Architect Elevator–Visiting the upper floors
- Foundation: Thinking like an Architect
- Deep Dive: Presenting like an Architect
- Deep Dive: Writing like an Architect
- Deep Dive: Drawing like an Architect
- Engine Room: Resilient Distributed Systems
- Engine Room: Platform Engineering
I offer these workshops primarily as on-site training sessions. Please contact me via the links below. See above for open enrollment workshops.