Advice Process

The advice process is a way of making decisions without a central approver. Its rule is that anyone may make a decision, and its qualifier is that before deciding they must seek advice from two groups: everyone meaningfully affected, and people with expertise in the matter.

Andrew Harmel-Law’s 2021 account applies it to architecture, where the usual alternative is a review board that meets fortnightly and becomes the bottleneck for every significant choice. The crucial detail is what the process does not require: the decider must seek advice, but need not obtain agreement or follow what they hear. Consensus is not the goal, and neither is approval.

Harmel-Law pairs it with an architecture advisory forum — a regular short meeting, open to anyone, where proposed decisions are discussed as architecture decision records. Attendees give advice rather than verdicts, which is what keeps the forum from becoming the board it replaced under a friendlier name.

The process is not free, and it is worth being clear about the cost. It moves effort from approving to consulting and recording, and it depends on people actually writing down what they decided and what advice they received — the decision record habit, without which the process leaves no trace. If people do not actually consult and record, it produces neither records nor oversight. The habit can be built as the process is adopted, but the work of consulting and recording does not go away.

The misreading to avoid is treating it as a replacement for authority. Removing the requirement for agreement does not transfer anyone’s budget or risk mandate. A team can decide freely within what it has been delegated; a choice that spends money it does not hold or accepts risk on the organization’s behalf still needs the person who carries that consequence. A constraint imposed from outside the design — a law, a contract, a policy — is not advice, and no amount of consultation lifts it. Conflating the two produces either paralysis or commitments nobody authorized.

Where the line between delegated and beyond-delegated decisions falls, and how it interacts with principles and standards, is worked through in Architecture Levels and the Scope of a Decision.

References

• Andrew Harmel-Law, Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally (2021)