Creating a Partnership Between the PM and the Architect

Udi has a great post, Money?! Schedule?! But I’m an architect, not a PM!. In it, he discusses a question he posed to other architects:

“When can you have your solution in production and how much would it cost?”

Ideally, the architect would discuss this with the technical staff and the project manager. More ideally, the architecture would emerge from prototypes. Even more ideally, from tested and implemented features.

But no matter how you and your team define an architecture, at some point everyone needs to know how long it will take and how much it will cost. To have an accurate idea, the PM and the architect need to partner on what "done" means, to estimate with the team all the pieces that go into this architecture, and to know how to assess progress, so everyone can tell how long and how much.

If your architect isn't partnering with you, think about what you need to do to partner with the architect. It's worth it. Otherwise, you really don't know when it's done and how much it costs--until the bitter end. And that's too late.