Congress Benefits

Communities of architects that have participated in a series of Architectural Congresses, have developed remarkably in two ways:

• in their personal stature as architects. The experience is very inspiring and motivating, as well as completely focused on action that is strategically aligned with the objectives of the architects and their projects. The result is that the architects who have participated in these congresses have been significantly more successful in their role. This is not just from the personal perspective of the architects, but is reflected in feedback from managers and co-workers who have been most impressed by the growth in stature of the architects as leaders, technical strategists, and system problem solvers.  

• in the coherence of the architect community. This is evident in the consistent use of terminology and process across the community, allowing for actual architecture workproducts to be shared much more readily, and increasing the sharing of lessons and experiences. It builds relationships, respect, and mutual understanding among architects from different parts of the organization, building bridges at the highest technical level. This networking and synchrony in mindset among the technical leadership of an organization is rare, so that the strategic advantage to be gained is all the more compelling because it is not widely pursued.

Congress Objectives

Different organizations will have their own specific objectives for their series of congresses. These might include a number of the following:

• enhance the personal effectiveness of the participating architects

• develop a common foundation of architecture concepts and processes across the organization

• enhance reuse across the organization, by creating strong relationships among the technical leaders, identifying opportunities to reuse components and architectural patterns and mechanisms, adopting common process and notation to make sharing easier, etc.

Congress Format

Congresses bring together the same group of architects for a day every month over some span of time (usually a year), with the purpose of learning new skills and practicing them in the subsequent weeks. The meetings allow time for learning new concepts and skills, planning how to apply those skills on current projects, giving and getting feedback, prioritizing learning objectives for the next meeting, and sharing case studies and lessons learned.

Audience

Generally, we focus on a community of architects in an organization, bringing together architects from different projects. Often, the architects come from geographically dispersed groups within the same organization, helping to build the links across  distributed teams and across related, but different product/service groups.

We have not yet run regional Congresses that bring together architects from different companies, although this is an option.

Facilitator's Background

Dana Bredemeyer, has over 20 years experience architecting, designing and developing software systems, including 16 years with Hewlett-Packard. He developed HP's internal Software Architecture Workshop, and continues to be its principal instructor. He has provided architecture consulting and training to architects, architecture teams and their management at the project, organization and business unit levels, and has helped teams develop software, firmware and system architectures for products, product families and information systems. Dana is currently co-authoring a book on software architecture for Prentice-Hall.

Pricing

In-house: Pricing depends on number of participants, and frequency and duration of the Congress series. Please contact us for details.

ABOUT BREDEMEYER CONSULTING|

Bredemeyer Consulting specializes in training and mentoring software and enterprise architects. We most typically work with architecture teams, providing training and mentoring to accelerate their creation or migration of an architecture. Where we can, we work with executive and project managers as well, helping to institutionalize architecture practices in the organization. We also offer a limited number of Software Architecture Workshops for open enrollment.

Contact: 1-(812) 335-1653

Sample Congress Themes

Kickoff

Our Software Architecture Workshop is a prerequisite for the Congress. This creates a common foundation of concepts, process and techniques. We find that if we don't lay this foundation systematically first, we spend more time dealing with different assumptions and inconsistent interpretation of terms, and end up laying the foundation piecemeal as we go.

During the congress, we return to themes introduced in the Software Architecture Workshop so that we can go into them in more depth. We also introduce new topics. Themes for congress meetings include:

• Technology Briefings: These focus on emerging technologies of interest to architects and relevant to their industry or architectural challenges. In addition to briefings from vendors, we try to arrange report-backs from lead adopters. We also cover lessons learned using any technologies that the organization is standardizing on.

• Architectural Patterns and Mechanisms: We share common architectural patterns (e.g., structural patterns like layers and interconnection patterns like brokers and bridges) and domain-specific patterns and mechanisms (like mechanisms for system integration and context-sharing, for communication and control, etc.). This provides an opportunity to share classical patterns as well as new "home-grown" solutions to problems faced repeatedly by architects in the community.

• Architecture Modeling: We devote at least one session to architecture description and architectural views, providing opportunities to practice architecture modeling. Participants get more of an opportunity to get to grips with what different models are good for in terms of thinking through architectural solution strategies and alternatives as well as communicating them. A common approach to system representation (modeling notation and semantics, as well as documentation standards) enhances communication within a project, and decreases the overhead in cross-project communication.

• Architecture Tradeoff Analysis and Reviews:  We work on prioritizing requirements and conducting  tradeoff analysis on different architecture alternatives. We cover architecture review and assessment techniques and get practice using them. This has the benefit that architects from other areas learn more about the mix of systems in their company, see opportunities for leverage and reuse, get ideas on how to solve their own architectural challenges, and learn how to quickly and effectively establish whether systems meet their top-priority requirements.

• Architecture Renewal: This session focuses on architectures that already exist and need to be evolved, revitalized, or resuscitated!  We practice architecture archeology--documenting an existing system's architecture. We show how to establish where it falls short of current needs and future requirements, and work on creating strategies to meet those requirements. This again provides opportunities to understand current systems better, as well as getting practice with the most common challenge of architects--adapting legacy systems to evolving requirements. 

• Architecture and Strategy: In this session we like to have executives responsible for setting business strategy join the architects responsible for technical strategy for part of the day. This provides a learning opportunity for the executives as well as the architects. It helps executives learn what input architects can provide to help set a more effective business strategy, and what strategic input architects need to effectively implement the business strategy in the products, services or business intelligence areas they are responsible for. It helps the architects understand the current business strategy and inputs to that strategy better. We also teach tools that are useful in developing technical strategy, such as technology roadmaps, industry and context maps, and strategy templates for documenting, communicating and managing strategy execution.

• Architects as Leaders: We build awareness of leadership traits and skills, and help individuals assess their on areas for development. We present useful techniques, facilitate exercises, and provide pointers to leadership development resources.

• Architects as Technical Consultants

• System Envisioning: This is the "fuzzy front-end" that leads up to creating a vision for a product, service or application. 

• Other topics selected in consultation with the architect community, and based on our competency model and experience.

Wherever possible, we use current projects as the basis for these practice sessions, and set clear objectives for what will be learned, practiced and debriefed in the subsequent congress meeting. We try to include case studies relevant to theme in each each meeting.