Functional Consultant Certain Ideas

Part 1
1. Introduction
Application development project can be categorized in following phases:
1.

Definition

2.

Analyze

3.

Design

4.

Construction

5.

Validations & Support

Based on type of project, whether its inclined towards consulting or a full fledge
development activities, the time spend in each phases would varies. Functional
consultant depending upon the phase in which he/she is working play a different
role to support the project activities.
You can go through the different phases of the project in the section described
below and get an understanding on the critical tasks performed by the functional
consultants. You will also get more information about the type of deliverables
developed by FCs during each phase.
Each project is unique and so is the client therefore FCs can use this document as a
reference point (like a checklist) and later customize their approach based on
clients methodology or projects specific requirements.
This document also incorporates some relevant inputs from the learning document
prepared by our functional consultants at the end of one large application
development project.
Hope you will find this document an interesting read!!
2

Definition Phase:

Projects usually begin with a vague idea about the business problem that exists and
how to solve the problem. The objective of definition phase is to understand existing

business processes by asking business clients and stakeholders why the system is
necessary and what the system requires in order to support the business.
Tasks performed by the Functional Consultant:
1.

Understand and document the current business processes.

2.

Determine the high level business requirements.

a.

Please do not confuse them with high level system functionalities.

b.
Requirement must be focused towards, how user is going to use the
proposed application and not on the desired features in the application.
3.
Define the system boundary to get clarity on the in-scope and out-of-scope of
the project.
4.

Identifying the business actors that will benefit from the proposed system

5.

Identify the high level essential business use cases.

6.
For each relevant use case, identify the essential activities performed by the
User. Capture that information into activity diagram. This can be called as High
Level To-Be business process diagram.
7.
Prepare and share the understanding document with the client on a
fortnightly or monthly basis; which highlights the current level of understanding on
the proposed application and any challenge foreseen by the analyst team.
Approach used during the requirement definition phase:
Depending upon the type of project, stakeholder and complexity of the problem;
Consultant follows different techniques to elicit and analyze the business
requirements. The table below lists techniques and when each might provide
useful.