Delivery

T he architect has a substantive role in the sales phase. You don’t wanna put all decisions in the commercial hands of a sales executive. What’s the functional scope? What’s a realistic cost estimate? What are the risks? What is a reasonable bid? WTF*CK are we talking about?

Cloud Adoption

Project Delivery

Business First. Convince the client of clever IT investments to achieve strategic business goals. Innovation can be good, but always consider the costs and risks.
Work under Architecture. All development should take place in support of a clear vision so that the desired endstate can be reached step-by-step.
Work Agile. It’s just not realistic to know and plan everything upfront via a waterfall approach. Priorities change, actual work differs from estimates, the truth is always in the middle. A fixed price contract will not guarantee financial control.
Give Insight into Costs. Pricing is not an after thought, but one of the most important contraints to take into account when designing your solution.
Always Consider Business Continuity. Cloud migration is good, but the show must go on at all times.
Involve Support from the Start. Prepare for good monitoring and error handling. Azure falls short on these aspects. Consider using Serverless360.

Price Calculator

Software Estimation Techniques
Price Calculator
Pricing by Product

A gile is a buzzword often preached, but not always practiced. Maybe you could even state that you shouldn’t always live up to the agile paradigm in a strict sense, because it can be very time consuming to have a daily standup, planning sessions, retrospectives, demos, etc. etc. I also strongly doubt whether self-organized teams really exist. Maybe we still need traditional project managers. No offence, it’s just a matter of doing what you like most and sticking to your trade. Anyhow, look for the middleground when it comes to working agile.