Roles and Tasks (Part 1)

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In the last post I said I would talk about actors in an ERP project. Running a project like this you also have to be effective at managing people and bringing in the skills at the right phase of the project. The art of this is to understand what skills you will likely need and stay one step ahead of the project to make sure the resources are ready when you need them.

Something else you need to consider is do you have skills in-house or do you need to bring in an organization to help you. Unless you are building your own in-house application most ERP projects are going to have some mix of external consultant support. What you need to do is decide what this skills mix looks like. What you can't do is outsource goals and project control.

The skills mix is going to vary through the phases of the project:

  • Analysis, Design, Development, Deployment, Operation.

You might be lucky to have people with a range of depth and breadth skills that you can rely on throughout the course of the project. Generally you will likely have a small core team that will stay consistent and then you will bring in skills as you need them through the phases.

I'm going to lists these roles independent of where the resource is employed. If you look at the Dynamics Sure Step methodology most of these roles are define in the context of consulting roles or customer roles. What I see in the market is Hybrid mixes.

  • Executive Sponsor
  • Project Board member
  • Project Manager
  • Business Process Analyst
  • Business Process Reference Owner
  • Business Process SME
  • IT Director
  • Infrastructure Support
  • Database Administrator
  • Functional Consultant
  • Technical Consultant
  • Development Lead
  • Developer
  • Build and Release Manager
  • Functional Solution Architect
  • Technical Solution Architect
  • Test Manager
  • Data Migration Lead
  • Change Board Member
  • Support Engineer
  • Engagement Manager

Now each project doesn't mean you will have all these people but the combination of skills needs to be in the people that you have available to the project and we'll explore the different tasks in the coming posts.

Cheers

Lachlan

(Original post at https://blogs.msdn.com/lcash)