All of your success has led up to this moment: your first day as a consultant on your first contract. Though this can be a stressful time, if you’ve followed the steps in this guide, all of your careful planning will help you make these first few days go smoothly. Get comfortable in your new role It sounds obvious, but I can’t stress enough the importance of arriving early on your first day. There’s no excuse for being late, and getting off on the right foot will go a long way toward … [Read more...]
Consider and Accept an Offer
You’ve landed your first interview and performed brilliantly enough throughout the interview process to secure your first offer—congratulations! Before moving ahead and automatically accepting the offer, take a moment to consider the offer carefully to be sure the contract is really a good fit. If you do decide to move forward, it’s equally important to understand the contract specifics and negotiate if you find anything missing or unclear. This way you’ll move into your new position on the … [Read more...]
Prepare and Conduct a Winning Interview
All of your planning and groundwork so far has led you to this point: landing the interview for this consulting role, and winning the contract during your interview. Making sure you’re 100% prepared is the absolute key to conducting a successful interview, so it’s important to find and use all of your available resources to gather information and develop a winning interview strategy. If you’ve prepared yourself fully you should have no problem presenting your experience and assets clearly, and … [Read more...]
Know the Project Life Cycle
Project phase terminology is a very broad subject with widely varying standards, but you will be expected to know the fundamentals. Depending on the project phase, different things will be expected of you, by your manager & other team members. Though consultant may not possess every necessary skill at the start of the project, management will expect consultants to be flexible and adapt to changing requirements throughout the project life cycle. What follows is a basic template of you can … [Read more...]
Oracle Consultant Skills – Functional
Project teams hire consultants of two types Functional consultants/Business Analysts (B.A.’s) Technical Consultants Functional Consultants or B.A.’s are the liaison between the project team and the business. They 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; to adjust Oracle standard features to suit the business … [Read more...]
How are you preparing to transition your skills from Oracle EBS to Oracle ERP Cloud?
This question was asked to me in Quora.com and below was my answer: I’m writing here about transitioning functional skills from EBS to cloud. I am writing from the perspective of an EBS functional person who worked on EBS projects and wants to know how their role will change. Despite Oracle really pushing Cloud there are not a huge number of big implementations yet, so information is not that easy to come by. A few things we know about Cloud that affect skills used: * No … [Read more...]
What does an Oracle Functional Consultant do?
This question was asked to me in Quora.com and below was my answer: An Oracle Functional Consultant works on the set of packaged software solutions called Oracle E-Business Suite(EBS) , or its more recent version; Oracle Fusion/Oracle Cloud. Oracle EBS runs on-premise, which means the software + data live predominantly on client's servers, it can also be hosted on the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Fusion mostly runs in the Cloud. From the perspective of the functional consultant, the hosting is … [Read more...]
How Can I Change my Career from an Accountant to a Functional Consultant Oracle or SAP?
This question was asked to me in Quora.com and below was my answer: There is a path from business super user into functional consulting in Oracle. I work with many ex business users who now manage the delivery of Oracle projects. N.B. All of these people had Oracle E-Business suite Super user knowledge levels. I always say there are six key skills of an Oracle Functional Consultant; these are also the key phases of an Oracle E-business suite project. Objectives This is capturing the … [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...]
