Photo by Author ©

Most of the architects/technical teams are usually part of post-sales where customers has already choosen Microsoft azure as part of thier cloud adoption strategy. I’m part of customer success unit (CSU) where customers from each industry (such as Telco, Finance, etc.) who have the potential gain from our services are hand-picked and we are going to have a static engagement as a team comfronting the customer to accelerate their cloud adoption/cloud migration journey.

In addition to collaborating with customers on a daily basis, I also need to help internal teams, starting with the account team, pre-sales to keep a track customer projects and coordinate with leadership and product teams to learn recently released upgrades and features.

                                                      Photo by Author ©

How do I plan my day ?

Being a trusted advisor to my customer, I’ve always need to stay close with them to keep a track of on-going projects and identify the gaps to accelerate. Ways I adopt to glue them is basically conducting workshops (on-site/off-site), customer interactions, POC (Proof-of-concept )sessions ideally, I’ll plan my schedule a week ahead for preparation.

Apart from that, 60% of my time in a day usually spent on:
1. Review/track current projects to find any gaps in on-going projects and assist with deployments.
2. Keep a focus time to respond emails and catchup with all the issues.
3. Coordinating internally with management, the product team, and the manager for any help.
4. Setting up lab for POC/Workshops and preparing the content.

Remaining, 40% is ideally spent on learning and it is really crucial to our job as we are meant to solve technical blockers on various services in azure, hence it’s very important to keep ourselves up-to date on all the latest updates.

As, part of our role, we do have mandatory trainings and courses that needs to be completed every quarter having proper planning and time management plays a critical role.

References:
I'm writing on medium, you can follow my article here A day in the life of a Cloud Solution Architect @Microsoft | by Musunuru Sharmila | Jul, 2022 | Medium