2024: A year in review

It's time to reflect on and revisit some highlights and lessons learned from 2024. As always, tech, and especially Generative AI, evolved a lot during the year. I learned much about LLM (Large Language Models), OpenAI, Semantic Kernel, and locally running SLM (Small Language Models). It's interesting to revisit the AI topic once again at the end of 2025.

In addition to technology, I gained valuable experience and learned essential soft skills, such as fostering collaboration, facilitating effective workshops, driving change, and engaging others. These skills are crucial to being a better Tribe Lead Architect and successful in tech.

Next, a few thoughts and learnings from 2024 regarding large-scale collaboration in initiatives and marketing your ideas.

Collaboration in initiatives

This year, I had the privilege of being involved in a large cross-functional project aka. initiative. An initiative typically represents a complex and essential project involving multiple teams, possibly spanning different business areas or departments. A common nominator of initiatives is that initiative drives change to existing organization or way of working. It's strategically important and an enabler for something new. Usually, it's complex due to many stakeholders and multiple parts of the organization involved.

It depends on the organization, but typically, an initiative is a virtual group of people on top of the existing organization structure led by the initiative owner. The initiative's cross-functional operating model aims to get the right people from various parts of the organization working together to achieve a common goal.

Collaboration in initiatives can be challenging due to varying processes, cultural differences, communication barriers, differing expectations, priorities, and working practices in different teams. However, these challenges can also serve as valuable learning experiences.

While collaboration often presents challenges its rewards can be incredibly enriching and worthwhile. Participating in such an initiative provides a fantastic opportunity to meet new people, learn the organization inside out, learn from others, challenge yourself, and be part of something remarkable. It's an experience that can leave a lasting impact on both your career and the organization as a whole.

Here are some of my main takeaways and lessons learned from working on the initiative:

👉 Create a well-defined problem statement
A problem statement describes the background of the problem that the initiative is about to solve. It provides valuable information about the current state, impact, scope, and desired outcome. The problem statement needs to be well-defined, communicated, and understood by everyone. A vague problem statement can cause major issues during the journey.

A problem statement should also contain a vision of the expected outcome. Vision helps clarify the goals and provide a clear direction. When the problem statement and vision are clear, it will also motivate the team to work towards a common goal.

The problem statement doesn't provide a detailed solution for the problem. The desired outcome of the problem statement is a high-level vision, not a detailed plan. A clear problem statement and vision will help to evaluate the viable options how to achieve the goal.

It's important to analyze the problem statement thoroughly and keep in mind that there is no hurry directly to solutions until vision is crystal clear.

👉 Create structures for transparent communication
Initiatives typically have subprojects aka streams which handle specific parts of the large project. Typically, streams are one way or another interconnected with each other. Therefore, it's crucial to establish forums to share information so that everyone involved in the initiative knows the current state.

👉 Engagement people early
The journey can be bumpy without the right people onboard. Find the right people and involve them early so that they can affect and influence. The virtual nature of the initiative provides a good structure for this.

👉 Create an architect forum
Architects play a crucial role in large projects, especially those that involve multiple teams and complex systems. Architect forum is a regular meeting ensuring that all architects are aligned on the goals, standards, and design principles, ensuring consistency across different teams.

👉 Make sure that decisions are documented
Create a formal decision process and decision log for the initiative. Documenting decisions (either business or technical) in a large initiative is crucial for maintaining transparency, clarity, consistency, and accountability. The decision record contains information about the context, decision, consequences, and who made the decision and when.

Overall, the decision log contributes to more efficient and informed decision-making in the initiative.

👉 Be ready to change the plan
As said, initiatives are typically complex projects and during the journey, knowledge grows and understanding of the problem and solutions evolves. Typically, something unexpected will occur. Be patient and ready to change your plans during the journey if necessary.

👉 Be active in networking
Have 1-2-1 discussions and create personal connections with people involved in the initiative. This is important from knowledge sharing and enhanced communication point of view.

Promoting ideas and influencing others

Everyone (also tech people) needs to have somewhat skills to sell, market, promote yourself, and influence other people. These skills are needed in every profession but with different emphasis. Software developers and architects in software projects need these skills. For example, as a software developer, you need to have the ability to present and sell an idea e.g. about the need to refactor the authorization service to architects, product owners, and colleague developers.

The ability to sell or market isn’t something you’re born with. If you feel that these skills are not my cup of tea, you can still learn all of these and be an even better professional. Even the best sales specialist will regularly practice how to be even better in sales.

I attended a couple of courses regarding leading change and influencing people which have been beneficial. Overall, I feel, that these skills are extremely essential in my current role and without these, I cannot succeed.

I gathered here a few key takeaways:

👉 Create networks and find a sparring partner or mentor
I would say that it's a prerequisite that you have trusted colleagues who can give early feedback and tips regarding the idea before going public. It's important to establish trusting relationships and networks in the organization.

👉 Be prepared and know the substance
It's always important to do homework properly. You're more credible when you know the substance and you have thought about the possible problems already in advance. As said earlier, iterate and spar with other colleagues the idea first. It's important to get early feedback before meeting the real audience and people who you're aiming to influence.

Think in advance, about how to present the idea. Depending on the people and context quick clickable prototype might be better than a long PowerPoint presentation.

👉 Know the audience and context
Collect information about the context of the team or people. What are their scope and responsibilities? It's easier to talk with people and be more empathic when you have more information and understanding about their situation and context.

Think also about the personality of the people you want to influence if you know the people earlier. Extrovert people might want to get directly to the point sooner than introverts.

👉 Engagement and empowerment
Try to sell your idea so that people can feel ownership of it. Allow them to make adjustments, which fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility. Highlight benefits for them.

👉 Be ready to iterate
The idea might not be ready in the beginning and it might need some adjustments. Listen carefully to people's feedback and comments. Be ready to adjust and change the plan.

About blogging

The year 2024 was pretty hectic and I didn't have enough time to write a blog. During the year, I published five blog posts mostly regarding OpenAI, Ollama, .NET Aspire, and Semantic Kernel. It was a pleasant journey to explore these topics in writing. I will revisit these topics this year as well. It was great to see from the metrics that the topics were interesting for many. Posts about Ollama and the Semantic Kernel have become some of the most viewed blog posts in my blog.

Overall, my blog had 22284 visitors and 24274 views in 2024. Thanks for reading!

In the middle of the year, I switched the CMS system behind the blog to Ghost CMS. The old system was complex and had many moving parts, which made it somewhat cumbersome to use. If you want to look at how totality looked earlier check this blog post. I have been extremely satisfied with Ghost CMS and its capabilities for a blog. I also changed the blog's main analytics platform to Umami.

Blogging continues also this year, and hopefully, I will manage to write more frequently.