Am I a (Junior) Solutions Architect?

Currently as I explained in the past, my role is the one of Technical leader. This, in our company is defined as:

“To identify and exploit opportunities for service improvement within the ISC (our office) environment – both internally and within specific customer accounts. To drive and coordinate initiatives designed to achieve superior levels of service in line with Computacenter’s contractual agreements. To take responsibility for the managing of projects to enable teams to meet & surpass productivity and service standards.”

I received a mail today in which a high positioned manager in my company asked me who in our office acts as a solutions architect.Now the role of Solutions Architect is one I had in the back of my head as a possible next step in my Career. I have never been a person that knows since day one what I want  in the future (being a Gemini in IT), but lately I have been looking into several different career paths ranging from consultancy to Solutions Architect.

When I read that mail this morning, It was the first time the name Solutions Architect role caught my attention. I believe it did not before, due to the enormous amount of job titles available in IT (from which I believe most to be made up by HR staff that was not sure how to classify their staff – Also I sometimes get the feeling that people think that longer job titles are for more important roles, kind of like an extension of their …)

I found that Microsoft offers a Certified Architect (MCA) certification path, which would prepare for this role. On their website they give a good idea what the role consists of(from their point of view):

“Communicate mainly with business owners within a company and with the technical staff that delivers the solution. The projects they work on affect the enterprise and they design the solution to take advantage of the existing assets, integrate them into the existing environment, follow the enterprise architecture, and solve the business problems of the business owner or unit. They are primarily responsible for taking a project through envisioning and design, and are more consultative to the project manager during the development and deployment phases, ensuring the project stays true to the architecture, time-lines, and budgets. If problems occur, they are escalated to the solutions architect.”

This is perfectly in line with my Job Description. Now I am aware of the differences between both definitions, but believe them to be very comparable. (Also the rest of my job description, which I cannot publish because of confidentiality) looks very similar.

The next days Ill be looking into this, and mostly on how I can now direct my role to that of a Solutions Architect.

POST – PRINCE2 Training

Well, a bit late, but as promised, a quick review on how the Prince2 training was.

The trainer, part of the company’s higher management level really knew his stuff. He gave us a quick historical overview, and explained the most important phases of the project. He did not go too deep into the diferent phases of the PRINCE2, but explained each in a more global manner. I believe he did this, to enable us to scale the theory to our business units and projects.

As explained elsewhere, I am currently very busy developing small to medium sized Domino applications, most are workflow, data collection or reporting tools. However I am the only one doing this.

I am now thinking that my supervisor could help me organising the huge amount of work. (currently developing 5 Applications and working on 2 Migrations) However it is hard for me, (mainly because I do not want to loose the freedom of movement I enjoy now), to talk to him about this. I would not like him to micro-manage me. This happens a lot with people who manage a small team (he manages 8).

Therefore, before he signs up for the training and starts getting great ideas, I’d like to propose a way where I keep the liberty I have now…. Any Ideas? Let me know!!

PRINCE2 Training

Next week Ill be joining a small 1 day training session on PRINCE2 Project Management.

I look forward to this as this is the first project management theory I will listen to since university. Since I followed Hotel Management studies where project management was not one of the most important subjects, and especially not IT projects.

This course will apply the PRINCE2 theory to IT projects. My biggest hope here is that Ill get some kind of solid base, to be able to plan, and execute my projects from.

Currently, with no “official experience” in planning organising and controlling projects, everything I do, I do according an order or methodology I’ve learnt from colleagues or passed (bad)experiences. Since I am doing a more or less similar job for the last months, I have learnt a lot. I am wondering how much that I have learnt I will have to “unlearn” after the course, and how much of the course I can actually apply in practice.

Now, I work in a pretty organised manner. Even though I started this position from scratch, I have managed to:

• Organize/Plan incoming Work Requests (by creating a request management tool)
• Maintain a solid work-log of all the different projects I am involved in and most of all, (Using my tool, instead of photocopied forms they had lying around here :s )
• Keep up with the deadlines I set.

I will now start reading a little PRINCE2 pre-course documentation (Wikipedia) to prepare a bit. This is probably not really needed, but as I am not an -A- student and classroom trainings are not my preferred method, I guess pre-study can do no harm.

After the training, my plan is to implement the theory in the tool I have created. As soon as its finished, probably, by the end of the month, I will post a link.

for now… a screenhot “as-is”:

Got-it!

The results from the exam I did a couple of weeks ago have arrived! I passed and am now the proud owner of the Foundation certificate in IT Service Management!

Waiting….

@work, we are all sent to an ITIL ITSM certification course. I believe the initiative behind it is very good, although maybe a bit late. A lot of my co-workers, most of them L2 IT support analysts are in daily contact with customer IT management, and I have the feeling that the importance of speaking (more or less) the same language is underestimated here.

The quality of the course was surprising. We did 2 mock-exams, and we all passed. However, what, in the age of 2.0 I find surprising that it takes the Test agency more than 2 weeks to get the test graded, and sent to us.

result…. still waiting…