The following list helps planning project staffing for various project stages. Most of the work happens on Design phase, so Designer and Requirements engineer are the most important roles. Developers are required if you need to make customizations to the default application. Typical customizations include role homepages (dashboards), form customizations for certain key use cases or implementing process backend operations. UX designers are always optional, and IT/Platform engineer (aka. Azure infrastructure architect) is only needed when you are planning to deploy your appication to your own Azure subscription.
| Role | Skills required |
|---|---|
| Requirements engineer | Requirements elicitation process, requires both person and technical skills. |
| Designer | Entity Relations (ER) design skills. Look for persons that have experience in either relational database design (tables, columns, foreign key references) or using other design tools to plan database schemas. ER design is also commonly taught at Software Engineering and Database Design courses on all level schools. |
| UX Designer | UX design practices, including knowledge of modern browser based techniques. HTML and CSS skills preferred, as UX designer is also responsible for branding the application. |
| Developer | C# language, Azure Blazor Web Apps with MVC style REST API Backends. HTML (bootstrap), browser side javascript and css stylesheets. Basic understanding of relational databases (uses MS Sql Database) and SQL queries. Azure storage account blobs, Service Bus Queues and using App Insights for monitoring and logging. |
| IT/Platform engineer | Azure PaaS services & Entra ID (ex. Azure AD) configuration skills. Security hardening Web Application environments with private networks, firewalls or Front Doors. Configuring Azure logging, monitoring and alerts for continuous services. |
Staffing jackpots
In a dream project, requirements engineer & designer and person overseeing the development (or even taking part of it) are the same person. Look for experienced architects who have done the requirements elicitation, know relational database design and are familiar with writing modern apps using Microsoft cloud techniques - an excellent candidate for key role in project. You can even pay him/her double if that's what it takes.
Also consider if your project really requires an UX designer. I'd prefer a frontend guy with good eye for esthetics prototyping HTML user interfaces any day over a now-fashionable UX designer (sorry UX designers!). Main reason being that the HTML prototypes and CSS can be directly utilized in the project code base. The wireframes and drawings made by UX designer: Not.
For development team - the smaller the better. Because Metcalfe's Law. Can you reduce the development management overhead (which is significant in eg. ceremonial Scrum), and have just real coders in the project guided by your Jackpot requirements engineer? Your development phase staffing just went down 75% if you can.