Category Archives: Excellence

Productivity hacks for Architects / Designers / Tech Leads

As per my experience, the biggest productivity hacks for Architects / Designers / Tech Leads are not to decide the variables / class names / loops / scope / data types / exception handling / object relational mapping & so on – they definitely are important and should be done, but so are the below points:

1. Design patterns

2. What is the code for?

3. Functional to technical mapping

4. Solution creation

5. Pseudocode & logic steps

6. Logic of solution for design / programming problems

7. Co-ordination with stakeholders & communication

8. Code review

9. Logic review of programmed modules

10. Architecture / Design thoughts

11. Knowledge updation around tools / products / frameworks usage

12. Time management of developers

13. Task management of developers

14. Solving problems in design

15. Programming standards management

16. Technical best practices management

17. New technology exploration

18. Helping sales, presales & practice

19. Working on POCs, solutions, products and accelerators

20. Updating oneself with the current happening in industry and domain

21. Automation, Security, Testing, Deployment, Continuous integration / deployment, Integrations, Logging, User Interface / User Experience, Application monitoring, Support structure, Clustering / Auto-scaling, Non functional requirements and other such important areas

22. Establish collaboration / teamwork among technical staff working with them

23. Right documentation and knowledge sharing practices

Many get stuck in only programming, that is definitely something we all love and do, but you should be dividing your time as an Architect / Tech Lead / Designer between programming and above tasks equally. Current enterprise softwares are complex and you can’t achieve much without collaboration and above form an important link for productivity in complex, large team projects.

#architecture #design #technicallead #solutionsarchitect

Email me: Neil@TechAndTrain.com

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Formula for Successful Innovation Driven Companies in IT industry

There are many formulas to build a successful company:
1. Passion
2. Great investors and board with good mentors
3. Great product
4. Niche skills and services
5. Great legacy
6. Recruit the best, train them, mentor them, give them good career growth, etc.
And so on

But one that I have observed and learnt is another one. We won’t go into the discussion about the earlier ones given above but let’s look at another way to build excellence.

Excellence and innovation is driven by freedom, creativity, knowledge, skill and right intervention by management with positive re-enforcement, promotion of good attitude and removing the bad apples at the right time.

One of the primary enablers for this is less internal friction and a culture to deliver excellence, promotion of passion to perform and learn without unnecessary hindrance.

One of the best ways to do this is to find people in your core teams to go into the non core functions over time willingly and on their own. These people can build a culture that appreciates the problems of the majority core function employees.

An example, if you over time promote in any Information Technology company your core development/product team members via training, education, etc. into Finance, HR, Project Management, Support, PMO, Legal, Sales and other departments you will build a company that appreciates the problems that the core function faces and they will help/enable them which in turn results in innovation and culture of synergy with excellence.

This is not the only formula out their to build a great company but one of the many ways. Only when we perform as one unit do we succeed most of the times, don’t we?