Something with a little more bounce in it.

Sometimes a project comes along and you just know that it’s going to be a bit of a nightmare. Post-Covid hard pivoting with the extra fun of speed to market made it challenging enough without taking into account we had teams across the globe - predominantly the UK, Australia, Sweden & South Africa. Unclear requirements, unknown legal and compliance potential ramifications all got added into the pot too. Hopefully this isn’t painting a familiar picture but I am guessing it is.

So what did I do?

Step 1: build relationships quickly! Getting my sponsors and senior stakeholders on my side was critical. Equally so was getting the lead architects singing from the same hymn sheet.

Step 2: understand the scope. Setting up a hybrid architecture in a brand new cloud region some distance from our bare-metal infrastructure introduced new technologies and challenges - latency being chief among them and so understanding of solutions such as riverbeds, Azure ExpressRoute and packet compression were imperative in shaping project delivery across global teams. Access controls RBAC equally so.

Step 3: establishing the critical path. With numerous front and back-end teams working in parallel workstreams, and senior stakeholders eager for progress updates, creating an all-encompassing network diagram meant that top down we were all on the same page at least at a high-level. A picture paints a thousand words.

While there was a lot more to it, those were 3 steps that were crucial in aligning global teams and stakeholders in a time-sensitive and business critical project.