Up to fourteen architects and contract architects at once. Sixteen came through the practice across two years, with ten to twelve running at any given moment — four CCIEs and four CCNPs among them, carrying Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet specializations, embedded across concurrent engagements.
Those three numbers are different claims and it is worth separating them. The headcount ceiling says what the practice could carry; the throughput says what a services business actually looks like, where architects arrive, get embedded and roll off; the steady state says what was really being run week to week.
The rhythm
A weekly practice operating rhythm, unbroken for nineteen months. Unbroken is the substantive word: a cadence that survives a bad quarter is a practice, and one that gets skipped when things are busy is a calendar entry. Alongside it, per-engineer certification plans and a vendor enablement track across Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Juniper — because in a practice where people move into senior and lead roles, the development path has to be written down rather than promised.
The gate
Reference architectures, standards and the design review gate across the client portfolio, so engagements were delivered against one design language rather than individual preference. Four things stood between a design and a client’s production network:
- Peer review, running continuously from May 2024.
- A Center of Excellence review of statements of work — catching the engagement that was scoped wrong before anybody designed against it, which is the cheapest place to catch it.
- A named internal design review.
- A routing-configuration review, specifically, because that is where a plausible design becomes a live estate and where the mistakes are least forgiving.
Underneath, the practice was set to produce a technology toolkit per domain, with the workflow to keep them current — the part most standards programs skip, and the reason most standards programs are out of date within a year.
Why a gate rather than a hierarchy
Fourteen architects across twenty-plus concurrent engagements cannot be supervised. A director cannot be in twenty designs, and a practice that depends on one is bounded by that person’s calendar. What scales is a gate everything passes through and a language everyone writes in — which is the same conclusion as architecture by influence at the City, reached from the opposite direction: there the authority did not exist, and here it existed and still would not have been enough.
Outcome
Engineers moved into senior and lead roles, and a portfolio no one person could hold delivered against one design language.