Common VCDX Mistakes: A M P R S

Continuing on with my Common VCDX Mistakes posts I have another one for you.

I need you to ask yourself a question. When you are working with customers, how many times do you write the following on a whiteboard?

vcdxrcar

My guess would be, hardly ever. So why write this on the whiteboard during a VCDX Design scenario? For those of you who do not know what these letters mean, they are the following:

  • Availability
  • Manageability
  • Performance
  • Recoverability
  • Security

Above, are the five design qualities that we look for within a VCDX Design.

  • Requirments
  • Constraints
  • Assumptions
  • Risks

Above, are four common areas where different aspects of the design often fall into. I’m not going to go into these in detail as there are a lot of blog posts out there that explain all of these in greater detail.

If you find writing these letters on the whiteboard beneficial to you during the defense , then by all means do it. However, do not feel that you have to. It’s not something the panelists require you to do. Often candidates will write this on the whiteboard and never actually use it, which is just a waste of your precious time.

Everyone is different and has their own individual ways of working with customers. Do what works for you as an architect, not what you think the panel wants to see.

As usual, these are my own thoughts, and may not be shared by other VCDX panelists. If you are interested in my thoughts, you can either subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter to keep an eye out for new posts.

Feel free to discuss in the comment section below.