This article is dedicated to the “Atelier” method, which we found to be effective for developing solution architectures for enterprise.
French word “atelier” may sound familiar. You may hear this word in the context of custom fashion design, fine art, or house design and architecture. In fact, there are many other areas where creative work is coupled with the need of delivering formal design as a work product.
Figure 1: Tailor Shop by Leon Bartholomee
Typically, a customer brings their needs to a highly skilled designer or architect. The designer and customer brainstorm the vision, options, and specific requirements, which are then incorporated into a rough sketch of the solution. Once approved by the customer, the sketch is handed over to the workshop to progress the level of detail in the design.
The work patterns and skills in an Atelier are tuned to eliminate any errors, comebacks, and roadblocks. For this, during a session with a customer, the designer must know exactly what questions to ask and how to record the answers. The workers in the shop must understand designer’s terminology and drawings without interpretation. They also must follow strict rules to produce a quality design which is ready to be used in production.
This method provides a great economic and performance advantage when compared with a single person doing all the work alone. For example,
- While the shop works on details, the designer may take orders from other customers.
- The workflow in the workshop uses specialization, - it assigns worker skills to certain types of work therefore making the work repeatable and therefore more efficient.
- Then, the labor cost of the workshop workers is lower than the designer's cost.
In enterprise environments, the Atelier style, as a design industrialization method, may bring many benefits. It can help change company’s culture toward innovation and strategic reuse. Please consider the following:
Skilled architects are hard to find, but their skills may be poorly utilized. Architect's work cycle includes many types of work like client facing, design sessions, presentations preparations and documenting. Architects are paid for the entire cycle regardless of the type of work they do, while not each type of work may require architecture training. When most of the routine and preparatory work is outsourced to a design support office or DSO, the architects can be assigned to more projects and their skills of a high demand can be much better utilized. DSO, at the same time, may provide services to multiple architects. DSO has worker skills matching the types of work, and the worker skills do not require architect’s level training, therefore DSO operation cost is much lower. As the result, economic benefit can be quickly achieved.
But this is not all. In many companies, architecture artifacts are hardly reusable or maintainable. They are mostly spreadsheets and text with Visio illustrations, not formal design. Therefore, the value of those work items is low. This can be improved when a DSO is involved.
DSO works not along the project lines but through addressing work items coming from multiple projects. This opens a great opportunity for optimizing the process of production and the reuse of any design and knowledge items, documents, and other work artifacts. In addition, conversión of the architecture artifacts into an enterprise digital model brings about a more holistic view of the enterprise available to the entire organization, which may provide even more benefits. All the background work like enterprise analytics, enterprise model custody services, tools administration, model publishing, data import/export and more can be established for a very low starting cost.
Figure 2: Design Support Office
The method does not conflict with Agile practices. Using ArchiMate as a common architecture stenography language allows the architects to start delivering architecture artifacts starting from the first meeting with the customer. No additional “document the architecture” phase is required, as the collected information is immediately saved as data and shared with DSO and other architects. DSO, in turn, uses a backlog of design topics in a manner like modern software development, therefore it can naturally blend into an Agile environment.
DSO may act as a tugboat to help maneuver your company to the right fairwaters:
It will help save cost.
It will reduce business continuity risks due to hard dependency on subject-matter experts.
It will help add competencies and let your team build confidence.
It will improve, manyfold, decision-making and access time to vital information and more.
Mondial can help you with setting up your Atelier either ‘out of box’ or with providing DSO services on demand. Please give us a call.
The term ‘DSO’ was coined in 2017 by Alex von Tiesenhousen, Sr. Manager, Metrolinx
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