Your role on a project
As a consultant, you become a trusted advisor on a Dynamics 365 project. You possess a great combination of knowledge and skills that position you as the voice between the business and the technology. You are an advocate for the users. Additionally, you’ll be an active participant on the build team, making customizations to the system from the requirements that you’ve helped to collect and document. Dynamics 365 applications are business applications, so always keep the needs of the business in mind as you work on a project.
Though a long list of potential technical duties exists, you won’t likely perform all of them on a given project. As you gain project experience, you’ll find a set of skills that you enjoy and excel in. Eventually, you’ll specialize in completing tasks that are associated with that skill set.
You’ll learn more about project phases in another module, but generally speaking, your participation will be part planning and part implementing a solution.
Planning
During the planning phase, you’ll meet with stakeholders and senior team members to become familiar with your customers and their business needs and to begin planning a solution. Depending on the project methodology, you might find yourself in a cycle of plan some, build some, and then plan some more and build some more. While a functional consultant participates in the planning, a more senior resource, such as a solution architect, will have the final say on the exact requirements to be built.
The requirements gathering process involves many moving parts. Depending on the size of the project and the size of the team, you’re likely to be included in many different meetings.
You’ll need to understand the business needs of the customer, helping to identify, define, and document their processes. You’ll listen with a keen ear and extract processes that the customer might not have identified themselves. You can accomplish this task because you know and understand the capabilities of the technology and the needs of the business.
Documenting abstract business needs into functional, technical, and design documents is often completed by a consultant. As previously mentioned, you’re uniquely qualified as the bridge between business and technology to complete these tasks.
Implementing
The implementation phase is where the team builds the solutions that they’ve been planning for. As a Business Applications professional, you’ll be qualified to do many of the direct configurations and customizations that are needed for building the solutions.
You might build out the business processes that were mapped, write reports and visualizations, compose apps, create the data model, set up security roles and access, or build automations.
As part of the implementation phase, you might also join in testing, user training, and stakeholder communication.