3 ways to master Technical Architecture Documents

As we have seen many times across our article series, the TAD (Technical Architecture Document) is rarely synonymous with simplicity, and can be a real pain point for IT departments. In this article, I want to step back from the specific issues discussed so far and explore the key levers worth improving.

Lever 1: The contributors

A TAD is never the work of a single person; it always emerges from teamwork involving many actors: project team, vendor, architect, ops engineer, security officer, and more. Although the TAD is everyone’s business, it is not equally accessible to everyone, it remains a complex document to read and understand, requiring command of many principles to be properly grasped.

When a TAD does not follow proper creation and update processes, it naturally loses its reference value, and trust shifts from the documentation to the people who “know”. This makes turnover all the more critical, since departures naturally erode mastery of the existing landscape.

Growing an architect’s skills is no easy task. It is not necessarily a matter of individuals (in the sense that a given person would not be capable or up to the level), but rather a question of overall mastery. The architect must hold solid, cross-cutting knowledge of the company’s technical ecosystem.

For example, this can include:

• Security topics such as the allowed exchanges between network zones
• The authentication types required for each use case
• The expected encryption depending on data confidentiality
• The company’s product catalog, in order to steer projects toward the right technical solutions and handle the fairly regular deviations

The architect must also be highly skilled at writing and diagramming. In short, it takes time!

The architect serves the projects they contribute to, while also being the guardian of the company’s IT policy. That guardianship requires the ability to adapt and arbitrate IT rules against the technical and operational realities of projects.

Lever 2: The validation cycle

Some companies, despite considerable effort in TAD review and validation processes before any production rollout, face internal resistance through “shadow IT” practices. These are interventions made outside any official validation, by people who have the technical means to carry them out: opening flows, provisioning machines, decommissioning components, and so on. All gestures that should, in theory, require a prior TAD update and validation in an architecture committee. The point is not to blame those who do this, but to understand what drives them to do so.

The project running a given application or infrastructure service has one daily obsession: keeping the service running. All the team’s energy is directed toward that goal.

In such conditions of permanent urgency, talking about TAD validation can feel like telling a walker they must climb a 3-meter fence when they could simply walk around it. The whole challenge is to align both parties’ interests: company governance must rally projects around the documentation effort, and projects must invest a reasonable effort while being made aware of how important that commitment is.

Companies therefore need a validation cycle adapted to the different cases. In particular, projects must be offered short, even immediate, validation cycles for simple cases. For example, if a project simply resizes a machine within a previously defined frame, validation should be very fast. Otherwise, validation becomes an obstacle.

Reviewers should also be better identified and targeted, with precise indications of which sections to review (those that have been modified or added). Too often, review cycles involve everyone on a pre-set mailing list and imply a full re-read of the TAD, even though only a small portion has changed. This either lengthens the review time or, on the contrary, results in rushed reviews.

Projects also need to be more aware of the real value architects bring, and involve them as early as possible in their evolutions. As a rule, when an architect is brought in very early, the documentation and validation work is immediately simplified, because it is planned from the start.

Lever 3: Tooling

Let’s keep in mind that the TAD is a set of documents in which the same information is spread across different forms. This construction requires great rigor to avoid any inconsistency that would lead to version mismatches (I’m using the latest version of the hardware table but not the latest version of the technical diagram) or information mismatches (I update the application diagram but forget to reflect the change in the flow map). It is also worth noting that the documents are produced through different tools. Most commonly, the Office suite is used: Visio for diagrams, Excel for tables (flow map and hardware table), and Word for the synthesis document.

Taming Excel and Word to build the structure of the relevant documents is fairly simple. With Visio, it is much less so.

We’ve seen the importance of the application diagram, which, as the cornerstone of the TAD, can require significant work. Precision, accuracy, and readability of information are key elements in its formalization.

Visio is a general-purpose diagramming tool, so it isn’t specifically designed to meet architects’ expectations. Furthermore, building a layer tailored for architects is hard unless a VB.Net expert lends a hand.

To define an architecture, Visio is not intuitive and requires a lot of practice before real mastery. Snap-point and flow-spacing management are notable examples. There is also no control feature to manage module and flow IDs to avoid duplicates. When formalizing the application diagram, time and energy go toward form rather than substance, which raises the risk of errors.

Cross-file communication is also impossible: you cannot, for example, link a Visio application diagram with an Excel flow map to automate the transition from one to the other. So it always falls on the architect’s rigor and attention to detail.

This reflection aims to restore the TAD to its status as a reference document, a status it has sometimes lost in certain contexts. Updating a TAD can sometimes take weeks, even months. The key is always to rally teams around the purpose of the effort.

At a time when the IT system is a major pillar of the enterprise, companies can no longer afford an approximate or distorted view of it. On the contrary, the IT system must be known almost surgically, because the day a serious problem occurs without anyone knowing why or being able to assess its impact, it is already too late.

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