Architecture Lifecycle

HP have posted a short article on the role of the Architect throughout the IT project lifecycle.  I like the perspecitive as often the dominant role of the Architect is the “design” role, and this is the one that is most repeatable and easy to capture in methodology.  The following picture provides a summary of the idea, with the yellow boxes representing the roles, and the ovals the phases.

The whole article is available here. but this is a summary:

The following sections map the the responsibilities and associated skills and capabilities of architects onto the Architecting Process. The responsibilities may fall to a single architect, or be distributed among a team of architects. Thus, someone on the team must play the role of leader who is empowered by management and the architecting team to make decisions that stick (the “architect with a baseball bat”). Others on the team may take on implementation responsibilities during prototyping or technology evaluation. If the architecting team has a project manager, that person may take on much of the “up and out” communication responsibility in addition to handling the personnel interface. Nonetheless, the lead architect must have a good proportion of the skills and capabilities identified below. The rest of the team must be good collaborators, modelers and system thinkers with significant experience in the domain.