Ask better questions for Long Term Value

Successful systems are never finished. They need to be continuously maintained, improved and evolved to keep delivering value. But does your Team know what good looks like? And what improvements to aim for?

A Problem Prevention culture means rewarding teams for avoiding failure. And not just fixing issues. It means continuously investing in delivering a Well Architected Solution that embraces engineering excellence.

Can your teams consistently deliver systems that address concerns around Operational Excellence? And Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimisation? If so then you are well on the way to having an system that can deliver long term value.

We have had great success rolling out the Well Architected framework across many teams. It is a great approach to help your organisation prevent problems. And keep your systems delivering long term value.

Well Architected Framework

Micheal O’Reilly has written a brilliant guide on how to make well-architected work for organisations. He gets into the details of rolling out Well Architected in your Organisation.

• Introducing the SCORP Review Cycle – part 1
• Security Cost OpEx Reliability & Performance (SCORP) Process Cycle – part 2

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Ask Better Questions

As leaders, we strive to enable and empower our teams to be able to make decisions. And to have the context that’s required. But we need to ensure they are challenging themselves to deliver the best solution possible. Quite simply the Well Architected Framework gives your leaders and teams better questions to ask. Of their teams, architecture, solutions, code, processes and practices.

In his post Mike outlines how to perform Well Architected reviews in a team first, iterative, and collaborative way. He shows how it is a fantastic way to empower and enable your teams. They learn, measure and improve continuously and can compare themselves to industry standards.

We want teams to feel confident that they are delivering a Well Architected solution.

Well Architected Reviews are a great sensing engine to help you understand and identify gaps. As well as challenges and issues teams and leaders are facing. The feedback can be used to identify new patterns and guidance to keep the Value flywheel turning smoothly.

We love these questions so much that we created our own mind map. So we could quickly reference them (available here). These prove very valuable in Architecture, Design, Reviews and leadership discussions. Having this mind map open throughout my day, enables me to ask better questions. I can also challenge our leaders and teams. And prevent problems before they happen. All of this leads to long term value.

AWS Well Architected Framework

Well Architected Serverless Series

We have performed many Well Architected reviews. And so we have built up a lot of custom guidance and advice to give teams. To help them meet the challenge of delivering a Well Architected Serverless solution within our organisations.

Thankfully Julian Wood of AWS has produced an amazing multi-part series addressing each of the questions within the Serverless Lens of the Well-Architected framework.

- Building well-architected serverless applications
Julian has done an amazing job distilling down best practices and practical advice that was very similar to the guidance and advice we would give our teams. So in true Wardley mapping fashion, we can now dispose of our custom built guidance and point teams at this series for a more definitive and official guide.

Thanks Julian and the AWS team!