Seagull Architect

Speaking of David Christiansen, he recommended a good book recently that I have been reading: Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management.

He dropped "Seagull Architect" in some meeting we were in a few weeks ago. He got that from the book.

A few excerpts from Johanna Rothman (author):

I've worked on several projects where the architect was like a seagull. He swooped in, dumped a lot of poop in the form of PowerPoint pictures of the architecture, and left as soon as possible. He didn't stick around for the hard part of the project: making the product work in the architecture ore evolving the architecture so that the product could work by the time of release.

. . . But if your architect is overly fond of drawing programs and not fond of writing code and can't really answer the developers' questions about how to make the parts fit into a coherent structure, you don't have a real architect. Eliminate that person from your project . . .

Yep, PowerPoint doesn't compile.

I have been accidentally guilty of this before. My reason was being spread thin, not that I can't sling code. I hated doing that to the team at the time. And it was true, the team really suffered. Ultimately I removed myself from the project and they were successful.