You finally buy that cute-sounding website address, and then some time later, you pick a cloud platform to host your website. These days, that’s starting to be a typical scenario. Cloud computing has brought the price of owning your own website down to very reasonable costs. Likewise, with the expansion of website domain addresses beyond the classic “.com” URL, the cost and ease of getting your own web address has improved. But when it comes time to use your shiny new website address you bought at a domain name registrar like Namecheap.com to deploy your website to your inexpensive Azure cloud account, that’s where things get a little tricky.
Both Namecheap.com and Microsoft offer online Help articles to walk you through the process, but not specifically for deploying a Namecheap.com registered domain to a static Azure cloud storage account. Namecheap.com provides generic instructions for routing your URL to ANY cloud provider, and Microsoft offers generic instructions for creating DNS zone settings for URLs registered at ANY domain registrar, but no two domain name registrars and cloud platforms are the same. In other words, once you try to customize the settings for a specific Registrar-Cloud pair, the instructions can be frustrating. This article provides help for making your Namecheap.com URL work with your static Azure cloud website.
You may ask, “why not just buy the URL domain and website hosting from the same company, either Namecheap or Microsoft?” You can certainly do that, though Microsoft, as of this writing, does not sell domain name registrations. If you’ve hosted sites with WordPress or Shopify, you should know how this works. But what if, say six months later, you decide to switch hosting providers or the company goes out of business?
It’s a best practice to have your domain registrar separate from the hosting provider to avoid having one company monopolize your online presence. You can probably apply this help to other pairings, but you will likely encounter some hiccups along the way. But if simplicity is your number one goal, then it might be more convenient for you to have one company take care of everything for you. No need to read the rest of this article. But for those who already have a URL domain registered with one company (in this case, Namecheap.com) and are looking to host a website on another company’s cloud platform (in this case, Microsoft Azure).
Namecheap.com is my registrar, but most domain registrars work in similar ways. Without further ado, I will skip the verbosity and get right to it. The process of configuring your URL to work with your cloud account is as follows:
1. Have your URL domain registration info from Namecheap.com handy
2. In your cloud account portal, setup storage accounts for static websites
3. Configure your Azure cloud account so that your DNS configuration is ready to go with your DNS nameserver
Both Namecheap.com and Microsoft have tutorials to help you (links are provided). I won’t repeat the steps here. I suggest reading that now before continuing. I will focus on the details that are not so obvious that can frustrate you.
As organizations launch digital transformation projects using Agile and DevOps techniques, it’s easy for them to overlook the dynamic of the teams they assemble to make the transformation a reality. The transformation team needs a technical vision as well as a business vision. Without the clarity provided by the vision, the team can break down into a basket case of ineffective sprints and unproductive relationships. The Product Owner role helps drive that vision into a set of strategic initiatives that then are vetted and technically prioritized, with the help of the Solution Architect, into sprints. Of all the relationships on a given team, the most misunderstood perhaps is that of the Product Owner and the Solution Architect.
One of the reasons for this misunderstanding is that underestimate the complexity of a project. With smaller organizations, this may or may not be a big deal. But for larger corporations, especially those that are publicly traded, this is often inexcusable.
Within any organization, there are two figurative sandboxes that employees work in:
• The Business sandbox and
• The Technology sandbox
In the Business sandbox, employees carry out tasks that directly align with the organization’s marketing and business support operations. In the technology sandbox, employees are tasked with ensuring that the best and most updated technology is being used to support the Business sandbox. In a digital transformation, technology is no longer an afterthought, or “those IT nerds over there,” but an essential engine that drives the business forward. For every IT project, the leading voice of the business sandbox is the Product Owner (PO).
For the Technology sandbox, the Solution Architect (SA) is the main voice. The Product Owner, as the voice of the customer, internal employee, and executive stakeholder, has the responsibility to manage a Product Backlog of requests for new features to existing solution, brand new solutions, and bug/defect requests. Since the Product Owner is generally nontechnical (which is usually a good thing), the Enterprise Architecture team assigns a Solution Architect to that PO. The SA and PO meet regularly (usually weekly or biweekly) to go over the Product Backlog (PB) to vet each Product Backlog Item (PBI).
Depending on how large the PB is, the meeting can be either quick or tedious. The latter is especially true for larger organizations who are introducing the concept of a PB for the first time. Vetting a the PBIs in a backlog is a multistep process:
• PO Guesstimate
• SA Guesstimate
• PBI Priority Ranking
• Executive Budget Approval
• EA Backlog
PO Guesstimate
The PO t-shirt sizes (e.g., Small, Medium, Large) the business importance/impact of each PBI based on business strategies and capabilities being addressed. No technical input involved. Sometimes, the PO will recognize that a new PBI was already implemented in part or in full by another solution already in production, or is just a matter of training. In this case, the PBI can be marked “Resolved” or “Closed.” There will be times when the PO needs further clarification on the business rationale for a PBI from executive stakeholders. These can be marked as “Pending further business review” or something similar. These items should be time tracked so that they don’t age too long in the product backlog.
SA Guesstimate
After gaining business insight into the PBI, the SA t-shirt sizes the effort to analyze and implement technologically. No business input involved. The most popular t-shirt sizes used are Small, Medium and Large. Some teams use X Large for really big epics, but that’s up to you what works. Sometimes, the SA will recognize that a new PBI was already implemented in part or in full by another solution already in production, or is just a matter of training. In this case, the PBI can be marked “Resolved” or “Closed.” There are also times the SA may need a second pair of technical eyes to vet a PBI, so these should be marked “Needing further technical review.”
PBI Priority Ranking
If a PBI survives 1 and 2, then the business and technical rankings together should guide the PO and SA to prioritize the PBI relative to the others. Ranking PBIs is mostly subjective, but a good rule of thumb is to give weight to those items that are quick wins or have been heavily requested among users and executive stakeholders for some time.
Executive Budget Approval
Once the PBIs are prioritized, the PO gets budgetary approval of the top 10 (or whatever the threshold is) from executive stakeholders. Once a PBI is approved, the PO marks the PBI as “Ready for Implementation” or whatever status is agreed upon.
EA Backlog
There are different schools of thought regarding how to the technology team proceeds after a PBI has been approved. The Scaled Agile Framework offers some good ideas around value trains and solutions trains that have helped many organizations. Plain old Scrum, Agile and DevOps have good ideas here. Choose the approach that works for you. Here, I am focusing mostly on the pure process itself without getting bogged down in methodology wars. Once a PBI is approved, some technology leaders directly assign them to a sprint backlog. That might work for smaller organizations, but for larger ones, there is a need for a technology “brain trust” to determine the next step before it goes to any particular team’s sprint backlog. This is where Enterprise Architecture (EA) comes into play.
Often, SAs are under the direction of an EA Brain Trust who assigns them to one or more IT projects. So it would make since that there needs to be an EA Backlog the mediates between the PO’s Product Backlog and each team’s Sprint Backlog. This becomes especially true for organizations going through a digital transformation that involves implementing cloud computing. In the cloud, there are three layers that a PBI can intersect with:
• Software (SaaS)
• Platform (PaaS)
• Infrastructure (IaaS)
Each of these tiers would have a corresponding technology team of technical development and deployment specialists to implement the incoming PBI within the organizations IT environment. With the typical sprint backlog setup, the default assumption is that the incoming PBI is focused on developing software. But what if it only involves standing up a SQL database or a Linux or Windows Server VM? The determination about what kind of team to engage for the solution needs to be at the EA level. This technology brain trust, the EA Team, should have leaders from each area to help engage the right team. The PBI would then be routed to that respective team’s Sprint Backlog to work. The EA team would also do a more technical score of each incoming PBI to determine if an SA is needed to guide the sprint team. A good starting point for a scoring system is 1 to 50, where anything 26 or higher means the PBI is strategically important enough to warrant assigning an SA to the team. Less strategic PBIs can usually be handled by sprint teams with just a normal tech lead or dev lead. If an SA is needed, the SA would then work with the team to do normal sprint planning and backlog refinement activities. The SA creates necessary design docs that are within the guidelines of the master EA doc.
Considerations for Consulting Engagements
The same principles apply to a consulting practice engaging a prospective customer after making the initial sales pitch. After a consulting sales pitch, there has to be a customer assessment phase to determine the level of effort both parties can expect before a full engagement commitment is made. Both roles, PO and SA, are needed at a minimum to determine the effort. During the assessment, the PO and SA develop and manage a backlog of items the customer would need to address before committing to a digital transformation initiative. Depending on the size and complexity of the organization, this can take anywhere from a week or two, to several weeks or longer. The less mature the organization is technologically, the longer this assessment phase will take. It’s similar to when you hire house cleaning service. If it’s your first time, and your house is big, it will take longer than a similar house that already has regular house cleaning.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully this white paper helped in understanding the important relationship between a Product Owner and a Solution Architect. The former is business oriented and is the voice of the customer, employee user and executive stakeholder. The latter is technically oriented, and is the voice of the technology teams and the mediator between the functional requirements (usually user stories and other PBIs) and the nonfunctional requirements that the technology teams implement to satisfy the business. The EA team helps determine how to map incoming PBIs to the right technology teams, and will assign an SA if the PBI is architecturally and strategically significant.
About the Author
John Conley is a Dallas, TX, based Digital Solution Architect and Cloud Engineer Consultant. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming eBook “2020 Business Guide to Digital Transformation Governance.” Feel free to reach out to him if you have any questions or need consulting for your enterprise engagements.
By John Conley
Photo Credit: Mimi Thian from Unsplash.com
Note: This article is also available on Medium.com.
As organizations launch digital transformation projects using Agile and DevOps techniques, it’s easy for them to overlook the dynamic of the teams they assemble to make the transformation a reality. The transformation team needs a technical vision as well as a business vision. Without the clarity provided by the vision, the team can break down into a basket case of ineffective sprints and unproductive relationships. The Product Owner role helps drive that vision into a set of strategic initiatives that then are vetted and technically prioritized, with the help of the Solution Architect, into sprints. Of all the relationships on a given team, the most misunderstood perhaps is that of the Product Owner, the Solution Architect, and the developers and deployers who make the digital solution a reality.
One of the reasons for this misunderstanding is the underestimating of the complexity of a project. With smaller organizations, this may or may not be a big deal. But for larger corporations, especially those that are publicly traded, this is often inexcusable.
Within any organization, there are two figurative sandboxes that employees work in:
The Business sandbox and
The Technology sandbox
In the Business sandbox, employees carry out tasks that directly align with the organization’s marketing and business support operations. In the technology sandbox, employees are tasked with ensuring that the best and most updated technology is being used to support the Business sandbox. In a digital transformation, technology is no longer an afterthought, or “those IT nerds over there,” but an essential engine that drives the business forward. For every IT project, the leading voice of the business sandbox is the Product Owner (PO).
Photo: Nesa by Makers at Unsplash.com
For the Technology sandbox, the Solution Architect (SA) is the main voice. The Product Owner, as the voice of the customer, internal employee, and executive stakeholder, has the responsibility to manage a Product Backlog of requests for new features to existing solution, brand new solutions, and bug/defect requests. Since the Product Owner is generally nontechnical (which is usually a good thing), the Enterprise Architecture team assigns a Solution Architect to that PO. The SA and PO meet regularly (usually weekly or biweekly) to go over the Product Backlog (PB) to vet each Product Backlog Item (PBI).
Depending on how large the PB is, the meeting can be either quick or tedious. The latter is especially true for larger organizations who are introducing the concept of a PB for the first time. Vetting a the PBIs in a backlog is a multistep process:
PO Guesstimate
SA Guesstimate
PBI Priority Ranking
Executive Budget Approval
EA Backlog
PO Guesstimate
The PO t-shirt sizes (e.g., Small, Medium, Large) the business importance/impact of each PBI based on business strategies and capabilities being addressed. No technical input involved. Sometimes, the PO will recognize that a new PBI was already implemented in part or in full by another solution already in production, or is just a matter of training. In this case, the PBI can be marked “Resolved” or “Closed.” There will be times when the PO needs further clarification on the business rationale for a PBI from executive stakeholders. These can be marked as “Pending further business review” or something similar. These items should be time tracked so that they don’t age too long in the product backlog.
SA Guesstimate
After gaining business insight into the PBI, the SA t-shirt sizes the effort to analyze and implement technologically. No business input involved. The most popular t-shirt sizes used are Small, Medium and Large. Some teams use X Large for really big epics, but that’s up to you what works. Sometimes, the SA will recognize that a new PBI was already implemented in part or in full by another solution already in production, or is just a matter of training. In this case, the PBI can be marked “Resolved” or “Closed.” There are also times the SA may need a second pair of technical eyes to vet a PBI, so these should be marked “Needing further technical review.”
PBI Priority Ranking
If a PBI survives 1 and 2, then the business and technical rankings together should guide the PO and SA to prioritize the PBI relative to the others. Ranking PBIs is mostly subjective, but a good rule of thumb is to give weight to those items that are quick wins or have been heavily requested among users and executive stakeholders for some time.
Executive Budget Approval
Once the PBIs are prioritized, the PO gets budgetary approval of the top 10 (or whatever the threshold is) from executive stakeholders. Once a PBI is approved, the PO marks the PBI as “Ready for Implementation” or whatever status is agreed upon.
Photo: Icons8 Team from Unsplash.com
EA Backlog
There are different schools of thought regarding how to the technology team proceeds after a PBI has been approved. The Scaled Agile Framework offers some good ideas around value trains and solutions trains that have helped many organizations. Plain old Scrum, Agile and DevOps have good ideas here. Choose the approach that works for you. Here, I am focusing mostly on the pure process itself without getting bogged down in methodology wars. Once a PBI is approved, some technology leaders directly assign them to a sprint backlog. That might work for smaller organizations, but for larger ones, there is a need for a technology “brain trust” to determine the next step before it goes to any particular team’s sprint backlog. This is where Enterprise Architecture (EA) comes into play.
Often, SAs are under the direction of an EA Brain Trust who assigns them to one or more IT projects. So it would make since that there needs to be an EA Backlog the mediates between the PO’s Product Backlog and each team’s Sprint Backlog. This becomes especially true for organizations going through a digital transformation that involves implementing cloud computing. In the cloud, there are three layers that a PBI can intersect with:
Software (SaaS)
Platform (PaaS)
Infrastructure (IaaS)
Each of these tiers would have a corresponding technology team of technical development and deployment specialists to implement the incoming PBI within the organizations IT environment. With the typical sprint backlog setup, the default assumption is that the incoming PBI is focused on developing software. But what if it only involves standing up a SQL database or a Linux or Windows Server VM? The determination about what kind of team to engage for the solution needs to be at the EA level. This technology brain trust, the EA Team, should have leaders from each area to help engage the right team.
The PBI would then be routed to that respective team’s Sprint Backlog to work. The EA team would also do a more technical score of each incoming PBI to determine if an SA is needed to guide the sprint team. A good starting point for a scoring system is 1 to 50, where anything 26 or higher means the PBI is strategically important enough to warrant assigning an SA to the team. Less strategic PBIs can usually be handled by sprint teams with just a normal tech lead or dev lead. If an SA is needed, the SA would then work with the team to do normal sprint planning and backlog refinement activities. The SA creates necessary design docs that are within the guidelines of the master EA doc.
Considerations for Consulting Engagements
The process of initiating a consulting engagement for a prospective customer has its own set of steps not unlike a software development project. After a consulting sales pitch, there has to be a customer assessment phase to determine the level of effort both parties can expect before a full engagement commitment is made. Both roles, PO and SA, are needed at a minimum to determine the effort.
During the assessment, the PO and SA develop and manage a backlog of items the customer would need to address before committing to a digital transformation initiative. Depending on the size and complexity of the organization, this assessment can take anywhere from a week or two, to several weeks or longer. The less mature the organization is technologically, the longer this assessment phase will take. It’s similar to when you hire house cleaning service. If it’s your first time, and your house is big, it will take longer than a similar house that already has regular house cleaning.
The successful completion of the engagement setup has, at a minimum, the following micro sprints as key milestones:
Request for info, quote, proposal from the prospective client
Sales pitch by the consultant
High level needs assessment by both the client and consultant
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Product backlog creation and evolution based on user stories and other feature requirements
This set of milestones is by no means exhaustive but is meant to provide a set of guardrails to manage the micro sprints for the engagement setup process.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully this white paper helped in understanding the important relationship between a Product Owner and a Solution Architect. The former is business oriented and is the voice of the customer, employee user and executive stakeholder. The latter is technically oriented, and is the voice of the technology teams and the mediator between the functional requirements (usually user stories and other PBIs) and the nonfunctional requirements that the technology teams implement to satisfy the business. The EA team helps determine how to map incoming PBIs to the right technology teams, and will assign an SA if the PBI is architecturally and strategically significant.
About the Author
John Conley is a Dallas, TX, based Digital Solution Architect and Cloud Engineer Consultant. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming eBook “2020 Business Guide to Digital Transformation Governance.” Feel free to reach out to him if you have any questions or need consulting for your enterprise engagements.
The importance of knowing your business processes before hiring a web developer is essential. Documenting the steps you take to engage your customers, suppliers, employees, investors, lenders and government agencies are important. This means you have to properly plan every step of the way from where you are now, to where you want to be. You have to answer questions like:
1.How do I reach out to the public to convince them to become paying customers?
2.How do I want my customers to learn more about my business?
3.How can customers read about my products or services before buying?
4.How can I convince customers to make the buy decision?
5.How can I make it convenient for customers to pay for my products and services?
6.How easy is it for my customers to understand my refund policy and actually request a refund?
7.How can I work with my suppliers to make it easy to buy their products and services I need for my business?
8.How easy is it to resolve my customers’ refunds when I need to get reimbursed from suppliers? Do my vendors make it easy for me to get such refunds?
9.How will my business continue if a disaster happens or if a supplier I rely on goes out of business?
10.How do I get the necessary licenses for my business from the local government agency (if required)?
11.How do I pay my business sales and income taxes online?
12.If I have employees:
a.How do I manage my workers HR and payroll needs?
b.How do I make it easy for workers to perform their tasks easily?
How do I keep investors and lenders informed about the performance of my business?
View the entire video for helpful, informative tips on getting your website up and running today!
Every so often, I’ll come across someone who had bright eyed dreams about launching a website as part of their business plan, only to have those dreams go down in flames because someone they trusted with their hard earned money failed to deliver the desired website on time, if at all. The average losses they suffered in terms of websites that were half done or poorly done has been about $400-900. How could this happen?
The problem comes into play due in part to greed on behalf of the website developer, and lack of knowledge on the part of the customer. Usually, the potential customer asks friends for referrals to web developers or they post on the various social media sites looking for someone. Without doing much research, they pick a developer who sounds convincing and seems “technical.” The developer charges anywhere from $250 to over $1,000+ to do the whole website without providing a lot of details about what’s all involved. They usually pressure customers to pay the entire amount up front. A few customers try to negotiate a lower fee or pay half as a deposit, promising to pay the other half when the site is complete.
Regardless of what price is negotiated, the outcome is often the same: The developer starts on the site, putting up a web page or two, adding some photos and text, and few social media links here and there, and then poof! They vanish. The customer tries calling, but no answer or the number is disconnected. Hundreds of their hard earned dollars gone and they’re ready to sue.
But wait. Is there anything you could have done differently to avoid losing so much money?
Yes! The first step is to make sure you have a reasonable business plan to go along with your website. Surprisingly, most website customers downplay this step, thinking all they have to do is upload a few photos and a contact page with an about page explaining what they offer, and that’s it. No! Your website is a reflection of the business processes you want your customers to be able to do using your website.
For instance, if you are a hair stylist, you may want customers to book appointments, look up and select various hair styles, order hair, manage the way they pay you, allow customer reviews, etc. By not outlining these features up front, you increase the likelihood of misunderstandings between yourself and your website developer. This, then, leads to you feeling like the website is not complete, and the developer might get frustrated and walk off. This is not to say that there are no bad website developers (there are), but in this specific scenario, failure to describe the features of your website along business processes will increase the likelihood of misunderstanding.
Second, research potential website developers. Remember you get what you pay for, so if someone is offering to do your site for a ridiculously low amount (like under $100 total for a full website), chances are it might be a bait and switch scam. Three to five years’ experience should be minimum for the best quality service, although that’s not to say anyone with less experience would be that bad. But it takes some years to get into a rhythm in website development. My company, Samsona Software, has been around since 1993, so I know something about longevity and consistent customer service.
Finally, know that there is a difference between a website designer and a developer. Designers are usually focused on creating web pages and making them look good from a visual appeal standpoint. Website developers go deeper than that:
Hooking up your pages to databases
Integrating with cloud computing platforms such as AWS and Azure
Integrating with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce
Implementing microservices to harness the power of various business features unique to your industry. This latter one is part of my offering to my larger business customers.
If you get a chance, try an initial consultation first before seeking help building your website. I can help with that, or anyone with serious experience in this space can do an initial consultation to help you get to where you want your business dreams to take you.
About the Author
John Conley is a technology and digital transformation consultant for Samsona Software Co, Inc., based in Dallas, TX. His service offering is focused on enterprise and solution architecture, as well as small business solutions. Feel free to contact him for your business technology needs.
Samsona Corporation 