Every supplier who pitches you a Dynamics 365 project will show you their team: names, roles, specialisms. Nobody really shows you the other side, which is the one where your people sit. It’s an aspect of the project that matters more than people might expect. Think of any project you’ve seen run smoothly, and there’ll have been someone on the client side able to make decisions or explain the data, and the diary space to actually do so.

Choosing the right supplier is crucial, obviously. But no supplier is good enough to make up for an empty chair on your side of the table, and that’s a calculation that’s sometimes missed before the contract is signed.

So here’s the people you actually need during a Dynamics 365 implementation, and roughly how much time you’ll need from each of them.

Somebody who can make a decision

Not somebody who can gather opinions and take them away. Somebody who can sit in a room, hear two different arguments about how a process ought to work, and pick one. The catch is that Dynamics 365 CE usually cuts across sales, marketing and customer service at the same time. A business lead who sits inside one of those departments can settle anything on their own patch, but then hit a wall the moment the answer affects somebody else’s.

So it’s worth being honest about what your business lead can sign off alone and what needs consensus from other departments. Where it’s the latter, what matters is how fast they can get an answer. A lead who can have something settled straight away will move the project faster than someone who has to wait for a steering group.

This person will be needed for the length of the project. The amount varies by phase rather than sitting at a steady level. Expect full days during the design workshops at the start, a lighter touch through the build, and a heavy stretch again around testing and go-live. That’s worth planning for because having a business lead on the plan, but not in the diary, can really slow a project down. To a certain extent, a project can carry on without them, and the decisions get made by whoever is in the room. But then some decisions will inevitably have to wait.

Somebody who knows why the data’s like that

Every organisation has at least one of these people. They’re rarely senior, often quiet, and usually the only person who can tell you what the “TEMP” flag in the customer table was originally for. In larger organisations, the knowledge is often split across multiple departments, each with their own view of what a customer record means.

You’ll need most of their time during the migration phase. Data profiling and mapping is time-intensive, and every trial load needs someone from the business to check the output properly. This can take a day or more each time, and there are usually several of these rounds.

The useful supporting roles

Entra ID and security groups, licence assignment, environments and whatever the other systems need in order to talk to Dynamics. All this requires time from the IT team. On a CE project at a medium-to-large private company, this time is never zero. And it can be the thing that stalls a project for a week while someone waits on a firewall rule or an admin consent.

There’s another department to consider. Migrating customer personal data usually needs an information governance or DPO sign-off somewhere. It’s a real gate that delays projects and needs to be included in the plan.

The people who’ll actually test it

The testing that really matters isn’t done by the technical team. It’s done by the people who’ll actually work with the new system, when they sit down with it and tell you, politely or otherwise, what doesn’t work in the way that their job works.

Their day job doesn’t pause while they do it. So somebody has to decide whose work is going to slow down for a while, and it’s much better decided in advance than discovered during testing.

Also, don’t forget the people who drive adoption, who will need to take time from their day jobs to train colleagues and answer questions. We usually do this job for our clients, but if you’re handling this in-house instead, make sure to plan for their time.

Somebody who owns it afterwards

Projects finish but the systems they installed continue. Once people start using the new system, they’re likely to ask for changes, and those requests need someone to prioritise them. If that person isn’t identified early in the project, the change request bill starts adding up. Or if you’re handling them internally, the system can slowly stop keeping pace with the business.

This person isn’t just needed at go-live. They need to be there during the implementation, so that they understand the new system and handover is a formality.

A sponsor who’s still interested in month four

Enthusiasm at kick-off is easy. What you need is somebody senior who’ll still be engaged when the project is in its middle stretch, when there’s plenty of progress but nothing dramatic happening. It’s the decisions that need to be passed higher up the chain during this phase where sponsorship earns its keep.

How to check, before you commit to anything

Put a real name against each of the roles, and the number of hours per week. Then, and this is the part that people skip, go and ask those people or their managers whether or not that time exists. Not whether they’re supportive – whether the time exists.

If it doesn’t, you haven’t found a problem with the project itself; you’ve identified an issue early. You can phase the work differently, arrange cover for someone’s day job, move the start date or budget for someone to fill the gap. All of those are cheaper than discovering the constraints in month three.

Put that time in the business case as a cost, because it is one. It won’t appear on any supplier’s quote, including ours, but it’s a project cost nonetheless.

The honest part

Making decisions about the people you need on a Dynamics 365 project is something that we can’t do for you. We can run discovery, do the build, migrate the data, handle the technical testing and support the system afterwards. We can’t decide how your staff will be deployed, and we expect that you wouldn’t want us to.

If you’re weighing up a project and you’d like to talk through what it’ll actually need from your side, we’re happy to have that conversation. No obligation, no pitch.