What I am about to say is complete and total heresy to the architecture community. We should do less planning and more learning.
In my experience working in large enterprises, much more time and money is spent on planning than on learning. By planning, I am speaking of the activities in early stages of large project developing the architecture and solution design to achieve a series of both functional and non-function requirements as they are understood at the time. In addition to the design work, I am including the build and stress, volume and performance (SVP) testing that goes on. This also is planning for the real thing, which is the system running in anger in production with real users.
I am not against planning of course. It is my job. What I am concerned about though is the imbalance in business enterprises it seems to spend a great deal of time and effort on this planning and disproportionally less for learning. By learning I am referring to deeply investigating what is happing in the live running systems we have to understand what needs to be done to improve the system.
Engineering is really a continuous learning process – the japanese call it kai zen.. they just keep making honda’s better and better little by little. radical changes are rare.
