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Balancing stakeholders’ vision with the reality of delivery can be very challenging for Solutions Architects. To get it wrong can mean unmet outcomes, project overrun and spiralling costs. However, a solution architecture approach grounded in engineering can avoid this scenario.
Problems can be approached from the top down or the bottom up. Top-down means taking a set of abstract business requirements and progressively going to the next level of detail, such as technical requirements, high-level design, low-level design, and product selection. The benefit of this approach is that it is very aligned to the business outcome, but the risk is that the technical solution may be overly expensive or very challenging to deliver.
A bottom-up approach on the other hand takes an engineering focus grounded in reality, with quantifiable costs and realistic deliverables. However, it risks not meeting business requirements and when overly pragmatic can allow constraints rather than vision to dictate the solution.
A good Solutions Architect will align both top-down and bottom-up. They will start at the top from business outcomes and use their softer skills such as empathy, listening, and collaboration to understand the problem. Then they will use market knowledge and creativity to map out a high-level solution. However, then they will go to the bottom and call on engineering experience to understand constraints such as time, budget, and legacy technology to understand the reality of delivering the high-level solution.
Finally, they will consciously align the high-level solution and the engineering reality. To do this, the Solutions Architect must operate as the interface between stakeholders and engineering teams, where they will collaborate and where necessary find compromise to create design which delivers on its promise for the business, within project timescales and budgets.
Too often I see projects fail because of a failure to collaborate or because they approach the solution only from the top down or the bottom up.