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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Salesforce Integration Approaches

Image
Salesforce Integration Approaches Most if not all enterprise Salesforce projects involve an element of integration. In this article I have summarised 3 common integration use cases that come up and an optimal approach for solving those use cases. This is useful for the CTA exam when certain scenarios come up and you have to consider possible approaches that can be used to solve them. Pattern 1 - Remote Process Invocation - Request Reply Scenario  In this scenario we want to make a callout from Salesforce to a Remote System and receive an immediate response. For example, we want to make a callout from Salesforce to SAP to check on Stock for a particular Product chosen on a Salesforce opportunity. We want the stock check results to be displayed in real time.  Approach Create a Lightning Component which has an Apex Controller that can make a REST or SOAP callout to an external service. Create a button on the Lightning Component to invoke the callout method in...
Read more

CTA Study Planning

Image
So you've made the gigantic decision to go forward and prepare to become a Salesforce CTA. Well done! Taking the effort to formalize your architecture experience with the Salesforce CTA badge of honour, is a great hallmark to achieve in the Salesforce ecosystem and it is great to have the courage to take part in the journey. As I always say, the journey is more important than the outcome, because it is the learnings from the process that you will apply day to day in your job, and necessarily the CTA stamp itself. So lets have a look at what a CTA journey typically can look like: Step 1 - Salesforce Domains Pre Study Step 1 involves going through each of the materials which are listed on the Salesforce Architects Trailhead site, and taking the time to meticously go through each article in detail. This is the fundamental wisdom that will build your Salesforce base, and to be a better architect your baseline must be strong. I spent a lot of time reading the articles here. Sometimes we...
Read more

The Evolution of Salesforce Implementation

Image
How Implementing Salesforce has Evolved Little bit about me I started my Salesforce career in 2009, working as a Graduate for Deloitte on a large Salesforce Customer Portal implementation for a media client in London. Having worked through multiple roles from developer through to Program Architect I have had a chance to see the growth and evolution of the Salesforce platform. In 2018 I obtained the elusive Salesforce Certified Technical Architect qualification, the topmost credential in the Salesforce ecosystem and am now the Head of Architecture for a global Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner, VRP Consulting, helping our enterprise clients innovate on the platform. In this article I will be talking about how the platform has evolved and how some of its newest features are transforming the way Salesforce is implemented. How things began Back in 2009, the declarative options were more limited and required the use of APEX code to deliver any form of cus...
Read more