The Role of the Technical Architect


The Role of the Technical Architect


In your standard Salesforce project, there are multiple roles involved: Business Analyst, Quality Assurance, Project Managers, Developers and the infamous Technical Architects. The success and cohesion of the team and steer of the project is heavily based on the quality of the Technical Architect involved. The architect plays a critical role throughout the lifecycle of the project from Presales through to Delivery & Handover, and it with their expertise that the project evolves. The TA must provide strong support for all members of the project team, and is the heartbeat of the project team as the delivery carries on.

“The binding glue of a Project”


The role of the Technical Architect is to have a deep understanding of the Salesforce platform, alongside supporting technologies, but also have a strong understanding of what the client is intending to do. I like to think of the Architect as “the binding glue of the project”, supporting the full team, understanding in deep detail the client requirements and guiding the client and the project in the right direction. They also play a very big role in steering the team in the right direction, educating the other team members to make sure they are platform aware when generating their requirements and guiding the project managers in their estimation, management and direction of the project. Lets break this down further to see the main tasks that the Technical Architect carries out.

Project Management - Estimation


The technical architect plays a big role in providing accurate estimates based on their project experience. The real technical architect uses their experience in the platform to form a deep understanding of the user stories, and align this to features in the platform which can be used to deliver the solution. Based on these platform features, the architect can line the correct feature up for the solution (Process Builder, Workflow, Flow or some APEX approach), and write down how long it takes to design, deliver and test this feature. This is a crucial task in providing the Project Manager with an understanding of how long it will take deliver a story in the solution. The Project Managers need this core estimation and solution validation to understand whether or not the project can be delivered within the necessary timeframes.

Project Steer - Solution Guidance

The TA has to understand which solution components make sense to come first in line with the customer delivery needs, and what can create a stable and solid platform. This will then drive in what Sprints certain user stories are going to be delivered and what the Sprint backlog needs to look like. In Salesforce projects there is certain core object setups that are necessary to come first. Typically we tend to deliver a solid stable foundation first – core objects, and core configuration in Salesforce, leveraging standard capabilities before we move on to looking at custom capabilities and integrations in future sprints.


Business Support

The Business Analysts (BA) have a key role in working with the client to understand their requirements in detail and provide consulting input to steer the project in the right direction. The TA has a role in providing the BA with guidance as to the capabilities of the Salesforce platform and other supporting technologies. The TA must very quickly form a high-level design which helps the BA to contextualise the requirements and get them written in a manner which is aligned to both the business and the technology that is being offered. Based on this, the TA then has the important task of breaking these requirements down to form a technical design which I will mention in the section below. It’s important for the BA and the TA to work hand in hand together, discussing and understanding the requirements together and forming the right plan of action for the project.

Technical Design


Understanding the core business requirements, and figuring out which aspects of technology can be used to deliver the solution is the core task an experienced Technical Architect needs to perform. An experienced Technical Architect should have depth of knowledge across the Salesforce clouds and other technology stacks, having the ability to recommend the right technologies and clouds to align to what the client is after. A good technical architect should also have the ability to align the client to the technology platform, and therefore try to ensure the requirements can be supported by the chosen technology stack. I’ve summarised this in just a few words, but this role requires a lot of skill, wisdom and experience and it is important that this step is done well and correctly. This is the primary focus of the TA, and it’s really important this is done right for the project to proceed in the right direction.


Future Proofing the Solution

The TA has a very important task of looking ahead at the solution, 2, 3, 5 years down the line to understand in line with the business vision and growth objectives what the system landscape will look like and what this will mean from a data perspective. Perhaps new functionality will be built into the system or new systems integrated which require a robust middleware solution with a concrete error handling framework chosen early on, to support the future growth needs. Also, from a data perspective as the volumes grow in the Salesforce platform an efficient archival strategy is essential to ensure the system remains performant and optional over time. There shouldn’t be any barriers to scale introduced early on, so it’s an architect responsibility to make sure the system will cope with future scale needs.

Pre-Sales Support


An architect’s design steer and input is absolutely critical during Pre-Sales. Performing reviews of proposals and very quickly forming a solution design with very minimal information is a very important task during Presales and essential to making sure the correct recommendations are being put forward to the customer. This involves digesting a large volume of information in a very short space of time and issuing a sound business and technical proposal to the customer.

So, I’ve written this blog post as an ode to all the architects out there guiding and leading projects forward. Keep doing what you do best. As with the other roles involved in a project, your role is super key in steering things in the right direction, so keep doing what you do, and make good things happen.

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