As the first step in the requirement-gathering phase, you must listen to the customer regarding what they need/want to accomplish.

If you are a customer, you must ensure you convey all the business requirements to your Dynamics 365 solution advisor/partner/consultant. The business process owners are among the best to communicate requirements.

For any Dynamics 365 implementation, we recommend the following tools to make listening smoother:

• A questionnaire
• As-is business processes
• Calculations and examples
• Existing templates and formats
• A walkthrough of the existing system

Prepare questionnaires to collect information and have the business SMEs fill it out. At this stage, you are giving them the opportunity to provide you with details of what the business needs and their view of the requirements it needs to meet.

The questionnaire should be tailored for the client by the domain, functional area, and role. If you are an implementation partner/advisor, you should use industry templates, the business process libraries in LCS, and any other tool that provides a good starting point for questionnaires.

You will have to tailor them while considering the client's business, scope, and requirements based on the proposal and the client's organization structure. Always make a note of your understanding.

The quality of your questions makes a difference in requirements understanding and collection. Ask the process owners/SMEs to explain the entire process, and after it's over, ask open-ended questions – for example, what would you like to have in the new system?

A thorough understanding of your business process is important for your advisor/partner. We recommended that they are prepared well in advance. Doing detailed homework will help leverage their knowledge about the topic and also in gaining the customer's confidence. It also reduces the chances of missing any areas during discovery and the time the customer has to spend explaining the process to you.

The following are our expectations from a solution advisor and implementation partner/consultant, as part of this process:

• Seek/get examples of complex calculations (for example, revenue deferrals, royalties, commission, and pricing calculations).
• Seek all the possible scenarios and the factors that influence the outcomes.

• Understand the current business process flows (as-is processes) thoroughly.
• Ask for any work instructions or operations manuals to document their current process, to help in understanding the current business process.
• Ensure that all present and expected interfaces are well documented with clear handover criteria, as well as clear success and exceptions factors. Integrations are important in a modern hybrid environment, wherein business applications must always exchange information with other best-of-breed systems to ensure they meet the expected goals of an organization.
• Get samples of the reports, especially external-facing documents (invoices). Sometimes, customer invoices can become a project by themselves (checks, customer statements, packing slips, shipping labels, and so on, as applicable).
• Schedule an existing system walkthrough, especially for areas that are unique for the customer's business.
• Take screenshots and document the as-is as well as the to-be processes.
• Clarify whether any changes have been made to the existing processes and provide recommendations regarding changes to be made in the processes.
• When working on global projects, ensure that the SMEs from different locales come up with unified processes and share their requirements, which may be unique.

With the listening process complete, it's time for the solution owners to move on to the requirement-gathering phase.