Technical Consultant

Technical Consultants are the experts having knowledge of the code, coding standards, and software implementation life cycle. Technical Consultants need not be any domain-specific like Finance, HR, Manufacturing, and Procure to Pay, etc. Their main role is to do customizations, extensions, modifications, localizations, or integrations to the existing product and develop reports. They have educational background and experience in software engineering and development.

Technical consultants start their careers after completing their education generally by working for an IT company or joining the IT department of any product or services company. They have a technical career path that matures into IT Leadership roles subsequently.

As the software systems gained complexity in the past few decades, large teams started working on big software projects. ERP’s replaced in-house development for major business processes. Best practices based on domain and functional areas started coming into play. All these changes created new dimensions and career paths for technical consultants and posed their own challenges.

In today’s competitive world to have a successful IT career, an IT Consultant needs to possess the following skills:

• Technical Skills – Technology and Trends
• Functional Skills – Conceptual and Business skills
• IT Leadership Skills – Management and Leadership Skills

If you want to improve yourself as a consultant, it’s important to learn how to keep your continuing professional education going. Understanding the challenges and some resources that are available to acquire these skills will improve your ability to exceed your client’s expectations and grow on the corporate ladder.

Resources to acquire Technical Skills

Good technical consultants recognize that their technical skills are important no matter in what area they are helping clients. Technology changes at a very fast pace and you need to keep your technical skills up to date with changing technology. As you advance in your career you should focus on doing more strategic roles, and for that, you need to maintain a wider breadth of technical knowledge and trends. As long as you continue to invest in educating yourself, you can always keep yourself growing in terms of technical skills.

Resources to acquire Functional Skills

As you mature into your technical roles, you are expected to gain more functional and business expertise. Gaining that expertise involves understanding how organizations function to accomplish their purposes and determining the courses of action that an organization has to undertake to achieve those goals and objectives. IT Functional Consultants are the experts having knowledge of concepts and business processes with an understanding of business flows with the added capability to analyze underlying software functionalities in comparison to business expectations. In IT Implementations two types of knowledge experts are needed, one of the business experts who provide the knowledge about the current business process and their expectations of the future automated system. These expectations are converted into software code by technical experts who specialize in various technologies and understand computer terminology and language.

To gain functional expertise you need to acquire three sets of competencies as defined below-

• Business Process and Flow – Knowledge about how business activities are carried out to enable their fitment into IT systems.
• Conceptual Knowledge – Understanding the why’s of the business processes. Why certain business activities are done, what is the logic or business need to perform those activities?
• Domain Knowledge – Knowledge about the industry and its challenges and advantages.

You can gain a part of this knowledge by going through the functional guides of the software being implemented. That provides you with sufficient information about product functionalities and how certain business processes can be a solution in a particular software product or ERP. However, they fail to provide you with the conceptual knowledge and technology independent knowledge.

Chartered Technofunctional Institute has made huge video and text tutorials available at their website www.technofunc.com to help technical professionals gain functional and domain expertise. Most of the resources available there are the best in the world and being offered free for all.

You can select the function in which you want to acquire new skills and understanding like Finance, Distribution, and Manufacturing, etc. Then you can browse through different processes that constitute that function and gain mastery over a particular area over time.

If you go through all the lessons that are available under any business process (like general ledger) you will gain both the conceptual and functional knowledge and will also understand the best practices that belong to a particular process area. The best thing about their tutorials is that they are very comprehensive and available on-demand and are not dependent on any particular technology. Hence irrespective of your technology like Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, and JAVA, etc. you can learn the underlying business and functional concepts.

If you’re already a good technical consultant, these characteristics and skills will challenge you to become better. If you’re aspiring to be a good technical consultant, this article lays out a roadmap for the things that you should be considering and working on immediately.