As an Enterprise Architect, you will quickly discover that demand for your time is constant and manifold. A good time management system is critical to your success. Otherwise you’ll find that many of the smaller tactical items that EA can help with will slip through the cracks. You’ll also find that longer term strategic objectives can lose their focus if you’re not tracking them appropriately.
What is Time Management?
Wikipedia’s definition of Time Management:
Time management refers to a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects and goals.
Why is Time Management Important to an EA?
Intangible Nature of Architecture
Architecture is by its nature an intangible. It’s easy to get lost in the intricacies of research and decision-making without delivering concrete results. Architecture doesn’t exist within the framework of a project planning framework as your typical project does.
A time management system provides this necessary structure to keep an abstract art delivering concrete value on a consistent basis
Constant Distractions
EA, perhaps more so than any other area of IT, is subject to constant interruption. Right in the middle of authoring your strategy document, your audit department calls with a question. Then you get back to writing your strategy document and you’re invited to a review meeting. Afterwards, you’re pulled into a discussion about a production problem, and then it’s time to go home. Your strategy document will be lucky if you remember it in the morning.
A time management system keeps all of your thoughts and tasks in one place where they are waiting for you when you return to the office.
Multiple Parallel Tracks
Because of EA’s broad reach, it’s common to have multiple tasks moving forward in parallel. Your Business Architecture team is exploring business process modeling while your Application Architecture team is researching web services and cross site scripting. Meantime your Information Architecture team is working on data standards and your Technology Architecture team is performing an infrastructure inventory. All of these parallel items have tasks that you need to track.
An effective Time Management System allows you to track tasks for parallel activities without getting overwhelmed or bogged down in the details.
Future Needs
As an EA, you’ll constantly identify items that need to be addressed “someday” or “in a couple of months”. These can easily fall off the radar as you pursue more pressing matters today.
A Time Management System will help you capture those important items for future consideration and come back to them when the time is right.
Summary
These are just a few of the key drivers that make time management a necessity for the effective Enterprise Architect. In my next installment, we’ll dive into a popular Time Management System called Getting Things Done, and how it can help you in your EA practice.
