Category: Book

Roadmap     Before a project can begin, it must be envisioned. This may sound like hippie mumbo jumbo, but the phase 0.1 of a project is called the roadmap phase. This usually ranges from two to six weeks where the strategy and business analyst team spends their time on as many fact-finding interviews from the top…

Requirements and Requirement Gathering The first phase of a project will revolve around requirement gathering. During this time, you will meet with users, team members, managers and project stakeholders to ask questions and begin to document people and processes to create an outline of what it is you will be creating or designing. Requirement documents…

Development and Delivery Phase Once requirements are wrapped up and signed off, it is time to roll up your sleeves and get to work. During this phase, systems will be designed, codes will be written, processes will be implemented, coffee will be drunk, people will be shuffled around, new roles will emerge and the business…

Go Live and Deployment Go live (also referred to as cut over or deployment) is the big show. This is where all the hard work of the project or phase is moved over into the production environment and when processes are implemented in the day to day for release. Go lives will be met with…

Roles Business Analyst As a new consultant, your role will mirror most closely to that of the business analyst. The business analyst will play a large variety of roles on the project and really is considered the Jack of all trades. Their job is to understand and analyze the different functions of the business. They…

Environments, Unit Testing and Releasing to Test This section applies more to technical and functional projects. Work usually takes place in four major environments: local, development, test and production. The local environment is all the work that happens on your laptop. It is isolated to the processors and hard drive you are working on. You…

Support, Documentation and Training In addition to the requirement and testing documents that have been created, as a consultant, you will also be responsible for creating hand-off documentation as projects and phases complete. These documents will include how-to guides, user manuals, quick reference guides, support strategies and general training material. The actual training artifacts you…

QA and Testing The quality assurance team will be in charge of testing all new items against the items described in the requirements and then stepping through the test scripts. They will attempt their best to break the product and deviate from any steps to see if the correct error handling is in place. Be…

Attire Attire is a pretty complicated topic, and by no means am I a fashion expert. Fashion trends tend to change year to year, so what may be in style at the time of writing this book, may make me seem like the uncool dad by the time you are reading this. Instead, I wanted…

Optics Being a consultant is not just about the work you do. How you are perceived is a big part of your job. This is where consulting differs from just having an industry job. Consultants will need to work hard to be perceived as a hard-working expert. Once you finally achieve that goal, the project…