Enterprise Architecture During The Time of COVID
This article references Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year— a story worth checking out if you haven’t yet come across it.
Before I tell this story, I want to acknowledge the grief COVID has caused for so many people. It has been hell for many, and it’s not over yet. However, we’ve found a small bit of silver lining in the shit storm.
Here’s our story.
A lot of businesses have commented on social media about how COVID has forced them to innovate their business operating model to survive. Suzie Dent’s buzz word of the year could be pivot.
We’ve had to do a bit of pivoting in our architecture team as a result of WFH (Work From Home). Unexpectedly, it has forced us into better work practices. Much better, in fact.
Caveat: I refer to MS Teams in this story —because that’s the standard technology where I’m currently working —other similar technologies work the same. Citrix WebEx, Zoom, Slack, Hive, Box, all the others. Whatever.
“Can I share my screen with you so we can talk through what we’re doing?”
We’ve taken to MS Teams like ducks to water. We love it. MS Teams has become a major enabler for our architecture work. Which is all about getting direct, immediate, real-time, engagement with executives and domain subject matter experts to whom we provide architecture services.
By way of introduction, our team produces Architecture Products. In fact, that’s the name of our team. ‘Architecture Products’. We changed the name of the team from ‘Enterprise Architecture. Because we were not doing enterprise architecture. Who cares about a name, anyway? It’s the architecture knowledge services and products that we deliver that are winning the hearts and minds of our stakeholders.
Back to MS Teams.
MS Teams screen share lets us show stakeholders — online, interactively — the work we’re creating for them in the corporate architecture modelling repository. We’re using an architecture modelling tool in real time, working with our stakeholders to capture and validate architecture knowledge. No email. No Visio. No PowerPoint.
MS Teams is the best way we have found to work on architecture products with our stakeholders. It’s better than physical meetings, because we can zoom in on a single aspect of a larger architecture product that we want people to focus on. Even if we’ve got ten people online simultaneously. We could approximate the same thing in a meeting room if we had a high-quality data projector, but MS Teams screen share is better.
Trying to schedule a group of people to show up in person for a physical meeting seems a bit old-fashioned these days. MS Teams lets us achieve collaboration ‘better, faster, and cheaper’ as we used to say.
Our team consciously decided to deprecate email in favour of communicating by MS Teams. MS Team has displaced email and email attachments for stakeholder engagement. We use email to send links to architecture knowledge assets that we host on the MS SharePoint corporate portal. Occasionally I’ll drop a small, simple, graphic screen cap into an email and ask a stakeholder if I’ve got that small part of a bigger architecture view correct.
Rools for MS Teams
Each week, our team have three scheduled MS Teams meetings. In which we use screen share intensely. Our meetings run for as long as we have things we need to talk about. Some days they last for 15 minutes. Some days a discussion on a single topic can go on for two hours. If it’s important, and it takes two hours, we’ll stay with that topic for two hours, until we get clarity and certainty on a result.
We all have personal ‘deliverables’ we have to get done as individuals, but we spend a lot of time thinking, talking, and working as a team.
We have a rule for when we’re talking on MS Teams. Every member of our team must be able to quickly share their screen and show the deliverables they’re working on. This could be architecture work they’re developing with a client, or it could be a few summary bullet points they want to discuss with the team. This ‘share your screen’ practice forces all of us to be disciplined and think before we start talking. If you haven’t written anything down, then you’re just using your face to move air around.
Putting something on the screen amplifies what you’re saying verbally. It reinforces the messages you are explaining to the team.
If you’re not sharing your screen and giving people something to look at while you talk— you’re using MS Teams like a last-century analogue PABX conference call.
“Look at me when you’re listening”
We’ve also started using our webcams during Teams meetings so people can associate a face with the voice. People seem to prefer not using their webcam. The senior executives always put their webcam video on during meetings. They know when you’re looking at someone’s face, you are more likely to pay attention to what they are saying.
In our team meetings, we have all started saying things like:
- After someone has been talking about something for more than one minute: “Have you got anything written down on this? Can you share your screen, please?”
If you’re still awake, here’s more:
