Making it work ("People"): what's in a role?

Role is different from job.

• The notion of "role" is to organize sets of skills and abilities into coherent and valuable descriptions of an individual's capability.
• A "job" describes what that individual is expected to do - sometimes disconnected from the role they are capable of satisfying!
• A "job title" is an attempt to characterize the combination of "jobs" one person can do, at a certain level of maturity or seniority.

Joking apart (was I joking?), clearly the role has to be capable of doing the job, and indeed may define what's needed for many different jobs - whether these job's form part of a job title. And of course a job may require the incumbent to fulfill several different roles.

Confuse the three, and you have a nightmare.  Particularly if your professional qualification is unfortunately "job title based"!

For example, while at the moment I am generally lumping "Architect" and Designer" together (hitherto fore, without distinguishing these as labels for role, job or job title!  In this entry, I mean...), the role of architect demands different skills to that of designer - something I highlighted in an earlier posting where I discussed how an architect may be more comfortable with the job of "lead designer" early in a project than a designer (oh boy - similar names for role and job!!), given the job's higher levels of ambiguity and uncertainty.

These distinctions of roles within our "profession" is critical if we are to succeed - each role may be honed to fit a particular standard job, but each and every one is built on a single core set of "hard" and "soft" skills that every architect and designer must have.  Here is not the place to go into detail, but a few key capabilities in that core can be listed as "the ability to..."

• Speak several languages, from Consultant to Cobol
• Predict the winner of next years Superbowl/FA Cup final
• Know when "yes of course!" means "I've no idea!"
• Keep your head when everyone else has lost theirs.

Clearly intended to be a light hearted list, but undoubtedly with grains of truth for the roles' soft skills.  the core role's "hard skills" fall into two categories, both of which are needed by all roles: those associated with Architecture, and those of Design - yes, a designer needs to understand and be able to contribute to architecture work, and ditto an architect and design.

Additional capabilities are then needed depending on specialism - on a general level, an enterprise architect speaks the same language as a solution designer, but uses it is very different ways.  More specifically, a designer (or architect) may specialize (performance, security, systems management, data), or remain more generally focused on a level (business, application, infrastructure).

These mixes of capabilities define the skills needed in the jobs of a Chief Architect through to those of a junior data modeller - which prompts another thought: roles and careers...