Integration and Operational Configuration
Connecting the system landscape
Operational configuration and integration make the lifecycle run end to end. Candidates must understand the major integration points: sales system to project operations (opportunity and quote), project operations to the general ledger (cost, revenue, billing journals), human resources to resourcing (workers, calendars, skills), and expense or payroll systems to project accounting (cost postings). Understand integration patterns - batch versus real-time, event-driven versus scheduled - and the role of staging tables, error queues, and reconciliation reports.
Configuration building blocks
Know the configurable elements a candidate is expected to reason about: numbering sequences, workflow and approval configuration, rate card setup and effective dates, calendar and holiday definitions, currency and exchange rate tables, project templates, and security roles. Understand that configuration choices propagate: a wrong calendar affects capacity, utilization, and scheduling simultaneously. Understand that integrations run on keys - a project ID or worker ID mismatch breaks posting without breaking the source record.
Traps
Common distractors: assuming an integration failure rolls back the source transaction (it usually does not); assuming a successful batch means every record posted (check the error queue); confusing a configuration change with a data correction; and forgetting that exchange rate timing changes posted amounts. Also watch for questions where the answer is that a record must be corrected at the source and re-sent, not fixed downstream.
Rule of thumb
For any integration scenario, ask three questions: what is the key, what happens on failure, and how is it reconciled? If the answer to the third is missing, the design is incomplete.