The Whole Team Is The Architect

It is absolutely not ok to expect that one who has been named as the architect in the project is also the only one who is responsible for the whole architecture. Further, it is not ok to think that you are the only one who decides about the whole architecture if you are the project's named architect.

One person cannot and must not do the whole job alone. The job of the project architect is much more to plan ahead and to moderate the team's discussions and decisions concerning the architecture. It is his job to boost a mental and a technical frameworks used by the team to succeed with the project. It is definitely not his job to play the decision bottle neck or even the god.

The whole team is the architect of a solution since the architecture not only includes hard technical things but also procecces for communication with customers as well as different functional stuff which is much more important than whatever awesome techniques. There is even much more soft parameters beyond the technical side of a successful solution.

The point is to make the team design, develop and represent the architecture as a team, not just by naming persons to play some roles. The architecture is never done, its lifecycle ends with the death of the solution, and it's always moving on. It will not succeed if not the whole team stays behind it as one man.

So, to follow the principle of a self-organizing team it is also highly recommended to assign the architect role to the whole team. Some of the guys will sure moderate the technical discusions and spend more time developing the technical framework instead of writing functional code. This is the technical architecture work and of course decissions will have to be made there, so the whole team participates those decissions.

Never let the one and only person decide! The whole team is the architect of the whole solution, and everybody applies himself.