Architect Solutions and Decisions Through Case Study Analysis – A Practical Approach for Decision Making

CXO, IT Transformation, Java, Scala, All IT

As a Consulting Enterprise Architect or Solutions Architect, your decision-making skills are critical as it impacts large groups in the enterprise or within a business unit. In this post, we discuss one of the practical and data-driven decision-making approaches an Architect can implement.

Components of a Decision Making

Fundamentally, decision-making includes high-level cognitive skills that are based on an individual’s cognitive processes like perception, attention, and memory.

Cognitive means thinking, reasoning, or remembering

Cognitive Process means acquisition, interpretation, manipulation, transformation, and use of knowledge

Perception means – a way of regarding, understanding or interpreting something

Decision Making Through Case Study Analysis – An Approach

This case study analysis approach for decision-making puts you in the real world. It acts like a problem and solution set leading you to effective and better decision-making.

Every case study will have one more situation. Going through various case studies will provide an opportunity to learn various decisions.

Also going through various case studies and executing the above steps for analyzing the problem in your hand provides lots of practical experience and making tough decisions in a wide range of situations.

Your Activities / Tasks in Case Study Analysis Decision-Making Approach

From the case study:

Step 1: Understand the Data
  1. Look at the data within the case study – What happened here  kind of thinking from the data (here means (at the enterprise or business unit)
    • Within the data look for facts, persons or personas, data, and other obvious clues or not-so-obvious clues
  2. From the data, try to understand the problem your client or enterprise, or business had; what was the course of action when they encountered the problem
  3. From the data, consider the following types of data
    • performance of the enterprise or business unit – ideas generation, goals, metrics, investments, communications, prioritization, organization structures 
    • understand the people’s frustrations (Efficiency Issues like getting onboarding a new team member or an application, can’t access critical applications when required, employees and business units having to teach themselves about new tech deployments), challenges (getting approvals, time limitations, limited resources/server instances, conflicting requirements)
      • Frustration occurs when the employee feels as if his/her time has been wasted
      • Frustration occurs when something goes wrong, the employee blames that thing, not her/himself
      • Challenge is a test of the employee’s skill. Any failure feels like the employee’s own fault. Some employees want to be put into situations where they can use the skills that they have been developing, and often in new ways
    • understand people’s beliefs and assumptions (the belief that Agile development is awesome as an example)
    • what is it that keeps them up at night
    • trends in the internal and external environments
    • changes, in the end, users’ taste
    • the behavior of the competitors (simple + lower cost, consumers pay more for your services with differentiation/prestige / positive emotions) – strategy is always about choice
    • motivations of key leaders in the organization
Step 2: Generate Information from the Data 

Generate figures from the data which might provide some meaning from the case study

Step 3: Organization the Data, Information and Create a Narrative Story

  • Organize the above data by creating a table and putting them into Strengths and Warnings
  • Look at trends or patterns from the information generated using the data. Trends or patterns include raising, or decreasing, profitability, worries about quality delivery or quality of the product or user experience of the product, and more
  • Try to find connections across the above data and information elements
  • Apply the core concepts related to business or technology like business models, architecture styles, architecture frameworks/design patterns

Using the above core concepts you can break up the complex understanding of the business from the case study into smaller pieces of information that can be used in the narrative story.

Step 3: Develop a Conclusion

  1. Develop pros and cons over multiple options you observed from the data and information
  2. Outline the assumptions
  3. Talk to your peers for a healthy argument and identify recommendations in addition to yours
  4. Finally, Develop a recommendation

Hope the above steps provide an approach especially while performing the Architecture Assessment for an organization or recommending a solution with tradeoffs.

My Personal Experiences for Case Studies:

  1. I watch the YouTube channel “This is my architecture” and gain knowledge and perform the case study analysis when it comes to AWS Learnings
  2. I purchase research articles from IEEE for new trends
  3. Invest in the Crunchbase website and analyze the new companies that started during this year and understand more about new companies’ purpose and solutions, and services.

 

 

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