MS Dynamics 365 – Finance & Operations

Gather requirements

• Identify operational and organizational challenges that may affect a business
• Identify existing business processes and opportunities to optimize business processes
• Gather information about expected transaction volume
• Categorize business requirements and perform gap fit analyses
• Review and validate business requirements throughout the solution lifecycle

Define the solution architecture

• Map business requirements to functional components
• Evaluate whether to build versus buy for selected business requirements
• Identify opportunities to integrate other Microsoft technologies
• Select the appropriate implementation tools including LCS and Azure DevOps
• Describe the Success by Design process
• Create solution architecture diagrams

Describe and document the solution blueprint

• Define an organization including company information, locations, and structure
• Document the implementation timeline including roll-out strategies
• Define the business process catalog and document solution gaps
• Define instances, environments, and solution components
• Develop a disaster recovery strategy
• Identify required security roles

Select a deployment strategy

• Develop a process to manage solution code and deployment
• Select a deployment model and identify instances and environments required for the selected deployment model
• Describe the One Version strategy for Dynamics 365 and the effects of One Version on solutions
• Segment solution development and delivery into logical phases
• Provide alternative methodologies and approaches for-deploying modifications
• Determine solution maintenance cadence and timelines
• Identify upgrade scenarios and select appropriate tools

Define an application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy

• Define code management and data flow strategy
• Define a Microsoft Power Platform solution management strategy
• Determine which build automation capabilities to implement
• Define a roll-back strategy for solution code and data

Determine a data management strategy

• Differentiate between transactional and historical data
• Define data quality and data validation process
• Define data cleansing and transformation strategies
• Define data dependencies
• Develop a data migration strategy for master, transactional, reference, parameter, and document data entities
• Develop data cut-over and data retention plans

Define the security architecture

• Differentiate between Azure, Dynamics 365, and infrastructure security
• Describe Azure and infrastructure security-related elements
• Describe use cases for and capabilities of record-level and role-based security in Dynamics 365

Define the integration architecture

• Select an integration pattern including OData, Microsoft Power Platform, Batch Data API, Azure Data Lake, Business events, and Dual-write
• Identify required integration and interface details
• Design integrations
• Define an integration testing strategy

Define the business intelligence and reporting architecture

• Gather business intelligence and reporting requirements
• Define data sources required to meet business intelligence and reporting requirements
• Select appropriate business intelligence and reporting tools including Power BI, organizational workspaces, financial reports, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), and the Electronic Reporting tool
• Define printing requirements including Print management, Document Routing Agent (DRA), modern report design layout templates, check printing and label printing

Describe Lifecycle Services (LCS) tools

• Understand the use cases and capabilities of different LCS tools
• Understand the use cases and capabilities of the Business Process Modeler (BPM)
• Understand the use cases and capabilities of LCS Methodologies
• Create a usage profile to describe current or projected usage

Manage interactions with FastTrack

• Identify the value proposition for FastTrack
• Identify FastTrack engagement types and personnel roles
• Describe typical types of FastTrack workshops and the inputs for each workshop
• Describe go-live checklist elements

Determine support options

• Develop a support plan and strategy
• Define post-go-live support plans including response times and service-level agreements (SLAs)
• Describe use cases and capabilities for the LCS Support tool

Determine licensing requirements

• Determine the types of licenses required
• Estimate the number of licenses required by using the License Sizing estimator
• Describe the process for estimating ongoing software licensing costs

Define a testing strategy

• Define a testing strategy that includes all required types of testing
• Define a regression testing strategy
• Identify opportunities forautomated testing
• Review use cases and test coverage for business scenarios
• Determine when to use RSAT, SysTest, Postman, ATL, Azure DevOps Test Plans, and other tools

Define a performance testing strategy

• Define performance goals and requirements
• Identify performance monitoring and testing tools
• Define performance benchmarks and success criteria
• Design performance and load testing strategy
• Troubleshoot performance issues