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Engineering Hives and Silos

Not Meeting in the Middle

The person holding the P&L and sponsoring the project needs new, improved capabilities for the business to create value. A suitable IT solution and project could deliver the needs.
There is no interest in architecture, performance, documentation, choice of platform. It just needs to happen.

The team of individual contributors in delivery just want to get their code into production as fast as possible. This is particularly true for contractors and offshore delivery centres with economical rates measured on the speed of delivery.
They too have little interest in architecture, performance, documentation, platform.

Folks in the middle who are tasked to make it all sustainable – so the next project does not cost an arm and a leg, and does not take a lifetime to complete – are in an impossible position.
They do care about architecture, performance, documentation, platform, and more.

Many businesses have been practicing decades of waterfall shaped delivery. The projects are typically sized between 6 to 12 months, while parent programs can run much longer. A sizeable work upfront on requirements is rapidly followed by delivering, churning out code up to final delivery into production.
Meanwhile, governance bodies and design authorities are desperately trying to wedge themselves in between stages to provide some oversight and much needed guidance.

Now that everyone and their dog is pitching to be agile, a torrent of anti-patterns emerge from waterfalling into sprints expedited by doing away with plan, design and documentation.
Practically, entirely removing the opportunity for oversight and to work out sustainable solutions.

A worthy read on the struggles of business-IT alignment: Don’t become an Enterprise/IT Architect… by Gerben Wierda

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