Category: Consulting

Questions and How to Ask Them A consultant’s job is to create answers and asking a good question is the number one tool you have in your consultant’s tool belt to get those answers. As you try to figure out the hidden problems and the clever solutions, you will be interviewing your clients in what…

What Does My Client Do? The very first thing you must learn before you set foot through a client’s front door is the basic understanding of what they do, their goals and how they generate revenue. Initial insight can be found on the company’s website under their mission statement or the “about us” section. Dig…

User Acceptance Testing The User Acceptance Testing phase, commonly abbreviated to UAT, is where the actual users of the system begin to test and validate the systems and processes in place. They will be responsible for ensuring everything has been implemented to the agreed upon requirements. They will click through screens, run reports, compare spreadsheets…

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…