A powerful team for Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Projects
07 May 2025
Delivering all of the awesome of a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Project - It is nice to have a full team and ChatGPT did a pretty good job of summarizing some of the roles, definitions and responsibilities. I also popped in and added even more experienced love.
🔹 1. Product Owner
-
Definition: Represents the business and end-users, responsible for defining the product vision and prioritizing features.
- A role held by the customer, aka the SME experts in the industry.
-
Responsibilities:
- Defines business requirements and goals.
- Brokers relationships to other business teams whose solutions integrate or need alignment with the project
- Maintains and prioritizes the product backlog (on a regular cadence).
- Clarifies business questions or aligns with the people who can clarify the business questions
- Makes decisions on scope and features in coordination with the budget.
- Owns the project budget and is a key decision maker in change orders
- Acts as a bridge between stakeholders and the delivery team.
🔹 2. Project Manager (PM)
-
Definition: Oversees the entire project lifecycle to ensure it is delivered on time, within scope, and on budget.
- A role held by the consulting firm, aka the SMEs who delivery thousands of projects
-
Responsibilities:
- Creates and manages project plans, timelines, and budgets.
- Coordinates team efforts.
- Manages risks and issues and mitigation options
- Communicates progress with stakeholders.
- Develops and presents change orders as necessary
🔹 3. Functional Consultant / Functional Lead
-
Definition: Translates business requirements into system functionality using Dynamics 365 configuration and customization.
-
Responsibilities:
- Gathers and analyzes requirements.
- Designs business processes and customizes and configures the application.
- Conducts workshops and training sessions.
- Serves as the subject matter expert (SME) on Dynamics 365 Sales features (or specific model driven app features including xRM).
- Shares and Enforces team customization standards for long term success
- Communicates Fit/Gap on features in alignment with business requirements
- Estimates level of effort and provides choices
🔹 4. Solution Architect
-
Definition: Designs the overall technical and functional architecture of the solution.
- A role held by the consulting firm, aka SMEs on overseeing the delivery of hundreds of projects
-
Responsibilities:
- Defines system architecture and integration strategy.
- Document system architecture in business and technical detail
- Aligns technical design with business goals.
- Oversees configuration, customizations, and extensions.
- Guides developers and functional teams.
- Overall responsible for the functional performance of the system and the alignment to business requests
🔹 5. Technical Architect
-
Definition: Focuses on the technical components like infrastructure, integration, and data migration.
-
Responsibilities:
- Designs technical architecture and environments.
- Plans integrations and security models.
- Coordinates with IT teams and manages system dependencies.
- Participates in peer review and supports the development lead in code reviews
- Overall responsible for the technical performance of the system
🔹 6. Developer (Dynamics 365 Developer or Azure Developer)
-
Definition: Implements extensions, plugins, workflows, Power Automates, and integrations using code. An extension is above and beyond what the Microsoft Development team plans to build and is not unexpected from Microsoft.
-
Responsibilities:
- Develops custom logic (C#, JavaScript, Power Automate).
- Builds integrations with other systems via Connectors, APIs or custom.
- Implements custom UI components using Power Apps or PCF or other UI/UX tools.
- Performs developer specific testing
- Supports deployment of extensions and solutions possibly being involved with ALM automation or testing automation.
- Develops Azure Function Apps or Azure Logic Apps leveraging Azure Service Bus (if also trained in custom development on Azure)
- Works with middleware tools
- Can potentially also have skills in Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory and Data Migration technologies such as Microsoft SSIS
🔹 7. Data Migration Specialist
-
Definition: Responsible for extracting, transforming, and loading data into Dynamics 365.
-
Responsibilities:
- Works with legacy data systems.
- Coordinates with the business to understand transformation requirements
- Provides options for cleaning data or transforming data, but always in coordination with the business Solution Matter Experts
- Maps and migrates data.
- Has a deep understanding of the Dataverse and Data Modeling and Schemas
- Ensures data integrity and provides checksum validation.
- Coordinates with the business on SME data testing after migration
🔹 8. QA/Test Lead
-
Definition: Ensures the solution is thoroughly tested and meets quality standards.
-
Responsibilities:
- Creates and manages test plans and test cases.
- Manages the Test Team
- Performs/Coordinates functional and integration testing and works with the business on UAT Testing.
- Validates acceptance criteria to confirm that it is testable
- Identifies bugs, issues and new user stories and ensures bug fixes are prioritized and implemented.
🔹 9. Change Management Lead / Adoption Specialist
-
Definition: Drives user adoption and manages the human side of change.
-
Responsibilities:
- Mitigates change impact
- Works with the business users on potential pain points
- Developers SME Champions
- Develops training materials and user guides.
- Conducts training sessions and user onboarding.
- Manages communications and stakeholder engagement.
- Ensures user feedback is gathered and addressed.
🔹 10. Business Analyst
-
Definition: Bridges the gap between business needs and technical implementation.
-
Responsibilities:
- Analyzes and documents detailed requirements.
- Documents workflows and processes and builds out current and future flow charts
- Supports functional consultants in refining user stories.
- Supports the business in writing testable acceptance criteria for requirements
- Assists in functional and user acceptance testing (UAT) testing and validation against testable acceptance criteria.
🔹 11. Integration Specialist
-
Definition: Focuses specifically on connecting Dynamics 365 to external systems.
-
Responsibilities:
- Designs and develops middleware and API-based integrations.
- Ensures secure and scalable data flow between systems.
- Develops and aligns on data volume and related performance needs based on volume
- Works closely with architects and developers.
🔹 12. Support / DevOps Engineer and Administrator
-
Definition: Provides operational support and manages deployments.
-
Responsibilities:
- Manages environments and CI/CD pipelines.
- Monitors usage, performance and logs.
- Manages ticketing and Power Platform Administration
- Coordinates the administration of onboarding users per environment
- Sets up automation for Role Based Entitlement security role alignment
- Supports go-live and post-go-live phases.