Architecture roles

The role of an architect through the delivery lifecycle

• Part of: Architecture: work in progress collection
• Last reviewed: 18 May 2026
• Owner: Head of Architecture

Here are some questions and focus areas architects might have at different stages of the delivery lifecycle:

Planning / inception / pre-discovery

Questions - What is the problem space? Is there a problem to solve? Focus - Problem framing, stakeholder mapping, input to business case Discovery

Questions - What is the problem? How big is it? Can we solve it? Focus - Problem statement, goals and drivers, conceptual views, business/technical capability mapping, early option thinking Alpha

Questions - What are our riskiest assumptions? How can we release value early? Focus - Solution prototyping, capability / service / application views, data architecture, design assumptions and constraints, options considered / tested Beta

Questions - What should we build first and is it adding value? Focus - Moving from high to low-level design (applications, data, integration, hosting, security), infrastructure / network topology, disaster recovery, logging, auditing, error handling, managing the service and support, recording and adjusting architecture / design decisions Live

Questions - How can we continually add value to the service? Focus - Continual improvement, relationships with suppliers, learning / future recommendations