I was skimming throught Ali Pasha’s Blog and came across this interesting post on architects role.

The basic working methods of the architects are covered by a limited set of very generic patterns:
– Viewpoint hopping, looking at the problem and (potential) solutions from many points of view, see section 4.2.
– Decomposition, breaking up a large problem in smaller problems, introducing interfaces and the need for integration, see section 4.3.
– Quantification, building up understanding by quantification, from order of magnitude numbers to specifications with acceptable confidence level, see section 4.4.
– Decision making when lots of data is missing, see section 4.5.
– Modeling, as means of communication, documentation, analysis, simulation, decision making and verification, see section 4.6.
– Asking Why, What, How, When, Where questions, see section 4.7.
– Problem solving approach, see section 4.8.

This was taken from the book at: http://www.gaudisite.nl/ArchitecturalReasoningBook.pdf.