Role of an IT Consultant in Different Phases of your Project

Role of an IT Consultant in Different Phases of your Project

In today’s modern landscape, Information technology (IT) plays a gigantic role in the way we do business, regardless of the size of our organization or the industry type. The rapidity with which the requirements for technology support are increasing, it has become a necessity for businesses to hire an IT consulting company that offers a robust portfolio of IT consulting services. An IT consultant helps in integrating and improving the process flow of your IT systems, works towards enhancing and optimally utilizing the storage space, looks into upgrading servers, and thus helps in the success of your project.
When you onboard an IT consultant, you onboard knowledge, experience, and a set of services at your fingertips to leverage IT to realise the objectives of your project. An IT consultant plays vital roles in different phases of your projects starting from planning to maintenance. His expertise can range from strategic IT planning to technology consulting, cloud consulting, VoIP services, IT security consulting, and beyond. Defining the requirements of your project clearly, will make it easier for you to select the best IT consultant for your project.

An IT-based project has the following phases:

Planning
Analysis
Design

Development and Implementation
Testing
Maintenance and Support

Here is an insight into the roles of an IT consultant in different phases of your project.

Planning

The action planning phase the first phase after the contract is signed between the client and the consulting firm. This is the phase where the consultant and the project members, firm up their action plans to address the problem, with defined goals to be achieved and set deadline. Here, the consultant efficiently explains what all parts of the process will entail and provides assistance with how to proceed through the developments.

Analysis

In the analysis phase, after collecting all the required information the consultant makes a deep analysis of the key pain areas and requirements of the project using various approaches and brings out a solution. He may use statistics to recognise trends. However, the approach for analysis will differ depending on the nature of the project and the type of industry.

Design

After coming to the conclusion about the problems and requirements post-analysis, an IT consultant design and develop converged technology solutions to meet the requirement of the project. Apart from solution designing, in most of the cases, consultants also help in designing the project by picking the tools that will work best for the unique situation that is bounding the project.

Development & Implementation

After building a design of the expected outcome of the solution, a consultant map the rode for system integration. The implementation phase is where he implements the strategy and action plans. The primary focus of this phase is to sustain momentum in the implementation.

Testing

One of the most important phases of any IT project is the testing or evaluation phase as it measures whether the problems have been solved, or are there further loopholes that need to be fixed. In this phase, a consultant also evaluates other aspects of the project such as the quality of the collaborative relationship throughout the process.

Maintenance and Support

The role of an IT consultant is not limited to successful implementation of solutions for your project, they provide you support post-implementation. Generally, the modern consulting firms layout a strategy to extend ongoing support targeting updates, improvements, and added functionalities to enhance usability, performance and scalability of the solution.

Conclusion

Generally, people understandably believe that IT consultants only give/receive advice. But in reality, their work is much more complex than that and they are one of the key drivers of the success of any project. An effective consulting entails several practices that meet numerous purposes including estimation, competitive analysis, strategy development, implementation, management and support.