As mentioned earlier project teams hire consultants of two types 1. Functional consultants/Business Analysts (B.A.’s) 2. Technical Consultants Functional Consultants gather and analyze the requirements, design, configure & test the solution, and support the business once the project has gone live. Technical Consultants allow the project to implement customized functionality. Hybrid Consultants have attributes of a typical functional and technical consultant. The following … [Read more...]
Know What You Know – Oracle Project Skills
“Know what you know” means being able to clearly define and communicate exactly what your skills and talents are in non-technical terms, and being able to communicate how you’ll apply those skills to complete the project objectives. You also need to communicate honestly about necessary or useful skills you may not yet have mastered. Though it sounds simple, this process can be challenging and many consultants miss opportunities because they fail to express what they know and why their … [Read more...]
How to Identify and Map Current Technical, Support or Business skills into the Oracle Functional role
Let’s talk about functional consulting. I’m going to introduce you to two new tools, one about the project lifecycle and one called the functional quadrant. What these two tools do for you is that they give you an idea of what a functional consultant does, they allow you to figure out, well, can I actually do any of the functional tasks already, they are going to give you confidence to approach job descriptions, recruiters, and hiring managers with a little bit more idea of what you’re … [Read more...]
Support Roadmap into Functional Consultant
Let’s talk about transferring into functional from the support consulting world. What does a Functional Consultant do anyway? The key skills are Objectives, Requirements, Design, Build, Test, and Transition, from an e-Business project point of view these are also the 6 key phases of an e-Business project. So where support comes in is the post go-live phase or the business as usual activity phase. You might do your objectives in January, your requirements in February and March. Design in … [Read more...]
How a Technical Person can become an Oracle Functional Consultant
This video is about becoming a functional consultant, specifically transferring in from technical into functional. What does a functional consultant do anyway? There are 6 key skills: Objectives, Requirements, Design, Build, Test, and Transition, and these are also the key phases of an Oracle EBS project. I transferred from technical into functional because as a technical person I was only useful for two or maybe two-and-a-half phases of this project. So I needed to make myself more valuable … [Read more...]
Bridging the “Functional/Technical Divide”
I think we agree that Hybrid skills can be useful in both functional and technical roles. So how can we bridge the gap between the two? Is it possible to learn skills from the opposite skill-set? I think it is, and part of the ambition of this blog is to help functional and technical consultants learn transferable skills from each other. I am not talking about turning "Funkies" into "Techies" or vice versa, but it should be possible to pick up some useful, usable skills from the other team, … [Read more...]
Hybrid skills in an Oracle E-Business Functional role: “How does this program work?”
As I've posted previously, in most cases it's possible to determine how a standard program works. The program will be documented, there will be standard reports to check before & after states, plenty of information on metalink & other Oracle resource sites. Re-use of customizations is a different matter though. With the best will in the world, it is impossible to capture everything in a functional design document. So, if you think a customization might be re-usable for your … [Read more...]
Hybrid skills in an Oracle E-Business Functional role: “What If?”
Information on use of standard functionality is available in the various resources available. It is (mostly) possible to determine what will happen if you update a standard data field. If you're not sure, its also relatively straight-forward to test this; all you need is a test environment and an appropriate data set. It gets more difficult to answer "What If" where you are depending on customizations. If I made assumptions that turn out to be invalid, what will happen. Will my … [Read more...]
Hybrid skills in an Oracle E-Business Functional role: Data Analysis
How often have you been asked to analyze an issue along the lines of "How often has this happened in the past?". For instance, "How many times has the original sales order number not been recorded on a Return?" or "How often has a customer address been entered without an email address?" We know that the standard reports are useful only as a starting point when a question like this arises. These reports are written with the user in mind, wont have all the display fields you need and be … [Read more...]
Hybrid skills in an Oracle E-Business Functional role: Customizations
Customizations represent a significant risk to delivery of the design. A functional consultant has a face-to-face meeting/conference call where he hopes to communicate the reason for the design, and checks the understanding of the technical consultant. These are the risks from a functional perspective: How do I know that the technical consultant understands what I want? How do I make sure the customization will choose the correct data set & update the appropriate data fields? Have I … [Read more...]
