Agile Architects with Joel Lindstrom and Gus Gonzalez

I added a new lesson to my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps course recently about the role of an architect in an agile team deploying Microsoft Business Applications using Scrum. And I wanted to check out my concepts with experienced business apps solution architects. But the only people I could get hold of were Gus Gonzales and Joel Lindstrom.

So I called them up and recorded our call about how they view the role of solution architects in Power Apps and Dynamics 365 projects.

Her’s our call.

Enjoy.

Joel Lindstom

• LinkedIn: Joel Lindstrom

• Twitter: @crmaudio

• Website: crm.audio

• Podcast: crm.audio

Gus Gonzalez

• LinkedIn: Guz Gonzalez

• Twitter: @GuzGonzalez2 and @CRMMVPPodcast

• Website: Elev8 Solutions

• Podcast: CRMMVPPodcast

Show notes

0:36 Introduction to Gus Gonzalez

0:55 Introduction to Joel Lindstrom

1:14 What’s the role of a solution architect in a business applications project when using an agile approach?

2:22 Congratulations to two Customery Academy students who both recently achieved their Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I certification: Shahzeel Jawed, Functional Architect at PowerObjects, in Melbourne and Sivakumar Mahalingam, Business Specialist at PowerObjects in Adelaide.

4:45 An intrinsic architect is a full-time member of the Scrum development team and contributes to the design of the business application.

5:14 An extrinsic architect isn’t a member of the Scrum development team but contributes to the design of part of the application when specialist skills are needed for a short time.

5:49 Gus works in a smaller practice where the solution architect is responsible for the success of the entire project. Gus’s measure of success is user adoption, not implementing everything that was in the specification.

6:55 Technical knowledge combined with business knowledge is necessary.

8:25 Joel’s architects help the rest of the team see the big picture of the jigsaw pictures.

9:07 Is the agile concept of a self-organising team reachable or just something to aspire to?

10:23 The solution architect should be the main person facilitating meetings and be the face of the development team for the customer.

11:23 There’s an overlap between the responsibilities of a solution architect and the product owner.

11:57 Development teams might have to work with architects that are not part of the scrum team.

12:22 Is the design specification document necessary today?

13:48 Documentation is often not updated so it becomes misleading instead of helpful.

14:15 Joel’s career has swung him on a pendulum between excessive design documentation and none. There’s a medium point.

14:47 Hitachi Solutions is using a blueprint, similar to that used by other FastTrack-read partners. It could include artefacts that span more than more story such as an entity-relationship diagram or a security roles structure.

15:45 Joel is using a wiki to maintain a decision register so that stakeholders can refer back to it later. Neil’s team is using Jira to maintain a decision register so that in the future we have a record of why we made certain design decisions.

18:28 What’s the sweet spot between just enough documentation to give you the big picture and get your project going, and when does it become too much and the documentation becomes too rigid?

19:19 Gus is flexible and will deliver as much or as little documentation as his customer needs, and he takes a similar approach to end-user training.

20:25 Some of Gus’ customers are taking on themselves to do all the system documentation and user training material using ClickLearn. Joel is a fan too.

21:33 Joel also uses Azure DevOps Wiki and XrmToolBox Entity Relation Diagram Creator for system documentation.

22:58 Keep a consistent team or swap team members as needed?

25:00 How do you plan future resource requirements on agile projects?

27:39 Extrinsic architects can be used to share a hard truth with the customer that an intrinsic team member can’t always say.

28:21 Good architects grow people on the project team.

29:35 A junior associate shows Joel the auto number field and Gus discovers the file field.

30:27 Balancing external resources isn’t always easier than internal resources.

31:57 Have you ever had a new team member derail a workshop?

34:42 You can have too many architects on a project. Joel is still friends with Scott Sewell.

35:50 Gus doesn’t want to use Flow for integration.

37:56 Neil had some fun times working alongside Leon Tribe and Olena Grischenko.

38:51 Joel asks about the role of an architect in a Power Platform project that isn’t a Dynamics 365 project the relationship between architects and administrators.

40:17 Do Dynamics 365 architects need user interface/user experience design skills to become Power Apps architects?

42:58 Gus doesn’t want to use canvas Power Apps either.

44:45 Joel sees a new architectural pattern emerging where there is a canvas Power App for frontline workers collecting data and a corresponding model Power App for information workers processing and analysing the data.

48:54 Should architects recommend the same design pattern for all requirements or recommend a combination of designs that might make maintenance and support more difficult?

54:19 What factors play into design decisions, such as whether to use Business Rules or JavaScript for form customisation in model Power Apps?

55:51 Sometimes talking your stakeholders out of the requirement altogether and keeping it simple is a better solution.

56:48 How do you deal with a requirement you think might be unreasonable?

1:00:14 Here’s what Joel thinks of best practices.

1:01:29 Gus will do whatever the customer asks for as long as it meets his one criterion. But Joel and Neil are a little more chilled about it.

1:08:15 Sign up for my free Agile Foundations mini-course if you’d like to learn more about taking an agile approach to Microsoft Business Applications.