Does architecture matter when crafting a project plan?
Absolutely. "Vanilla" or non-customized system architecture design approaches are much easier
to configure, test and ultimately deploy. Creative configurations that call for "spaghetti
architecture" (such as two of the case studies in my book Why New Systems Fail:
Theory and Practice Collide) are much more costly, difficult to test and likely to have
unforeseen consequences and issues. As a general rule, increasing the number of customizations in a
system architecture design increases the time and/or resources needed for the project to be
successful.
This was first published in August 2010