Project team members
All project team members need to understand how Dynamics 365 works. They should know the out-of-the-box capabilities and supported methods to customize and extend the application to meet the needs of the customer. The following sections describe the most common project team roles.
Functional consultant
Functional consultants analyze business requirements and translate those requirements into fully realized business processes and solutions that implement industry best practices. Functional consultants serve as key resources in implementing and setting up applications to meet business requirements.
Functional consultants have a fundamental understanding of accounting principles and financial operations of businesses, customer service, field service, manufacturing, retail, and supply chain management concepts. Functional consultants that are focusing on customer engagement apps will understand the business needs for software to manage sales and customer service activities and data.
While this may seem like a daunting list of knowledge, don’t worry. You are not expected to be an expert yet, you will gain this knowledge over time as your experience and interests grow.
Typically, functional consultants specialize in one or more apps, capabilities, or feature sets of Microsoft Dynamics 365, including Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Manufacturing, or Supply Chain Management. An overlap exists between these specialties. It's common to find a consultant who specializes in sales and is also capable as a consultant on a customer service project team.
Developer
Developers work with Dynamics 365 to implement and extend applications to meet the requirements of the business. Developers can provide fully realized solutions by using standardized application coding patterns, extensible features, and external integrations. Developers might use custom code to enable Dynamics 365 apps to be extended to handle a variety of unique customer requirements.
Solution architect
Solution architects for Dynamics 365 are trusted advisors who understand business recommended practices, software capabilities, and implementation delivery. As a result, solution architects can lead implementation team members to apply Dynamics 365 solutions that can achieve the defined implementation goals.