When helping customers build their internal D365 F&O team, the story usually starts like this:
- Company spends $ 3M to $10M+ on an ERP implementation.
- The partner runs 95% of the project.
- External consultants configure the system, build the integrations, and lead the testing.
- The project goes live. Wahoo.
- The partner rolls off. Uh oh.
IT leadership looks around the room and realizes nobody internal actually knows how D365 works. The system is live, but most of the ERP knowledge walked out the door with the consultants.
Building an internal D365 F&O team while using external experts isn’t something that happens naturally. It has to be designed. And it has to be driven by the VP of IT or CIO, because nobody else in the organisation has both the authority and the incentive to make it happen.
Why your internal D365 F&O team doesn’t develop by default
Let’s be honest about the incentive structure.
Your implementation partner is paid to deliver a working system. They are not paid to build your internal team’s capability. Knowledge transfer appears in every SOW, usually as a line item somewhere near the bottom. In practice, it means a few training sessions in the final weeks of the project, when everyone is exhausted and focused on go-live cutover, not learning.
The external consultants on the project are focused on configuration, testing, and hitting milestones. They’re good people doing their job. But their job is to deliver the system, not to teach your team how to run it. And your internal team members are often split between their day jobs and the project, which means they’re in the room for the workshops but not doing the hands-on work that creates real capability.
The result is predictable. Your team watches the consultants configure D365. They attend the training. They pass the knowledge transfer checkbox. And six months after go-live, when something needs to change, they don’t know how to do it. Not because they’re not smart. Because watching someone configure a system and actually configuring it yourself are two completely different things.
If you want to build a real internal D365 F&O team, you have to change the structure of the project itself. Not bolt on training at the end.
Need D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Our vetted independent contractors are ready to jump in. Let’s talk:
Decide what your internal D365 F&O team actually needs to own
You don’t need to replicate your partner’s entire team internally. That’s unrealistic and unnecessary. What you need is enough internal D365 F&O team that can handle 80% of your post go-live needs without picking up the phone.
For a manufacturing company running D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management, that typically means owning three things internally.
Functional configuration knowledge. Someone who understands how your D365 Finance module is configured and can make changes to posting profiles, number sequences, workflows, and reporting dimensions without calling the partner. Someone who understands your Supply Chain configuration well enough to adjust warehouse parameters, modify production order defaults, and troubleshoot planning runs. These don’t need to be the same person. But they need to exist.
Data and reporting capability. Someone who can build and modify Power BI reports, manage data entities, and handle routine data imports and exports. In manufacturing, this is critical. Your operations team will need new reports constantly as the business evolves. If every report requires an external engagement, you’ll never keep up.
Integration and technical troubleshooting. At least one person who understands how D365 connects to your other systems, can read integration logs, and knows when something breaks whether it’s a D365 issue, a middleware issue, or an upstream data issue. This person doesn’t need to be an X++ developer. But they need to understand the architecture well enough to triage problems quickly.
Everything else, deep X++ development, major configuration changes, version upgrades, complex new module deployments, those are the things you bring external experts in for. The goal is to stop paying consulting rates for things your team should be able to handle.
How to structure the project so your internal D365 F&O team actually learns
This is where most companies might struggle. They assign internal people to the project team but don’t change what those people actually do during the project.
If you want to build an internal D365 F&O team, your people can’t just attend workshops and review documents. They need to do the work. Alongside the external consultants, not watching from the side.
Pair your internal people with external consultants on every module. Not as observers. As co-configurators. Your Finance lead should be in the system configuring the chart of accounts alongside the partner’s consultant, not reviewing a document that describes the chart of accounts. Your Supply Chain lead should be setting up warehouse parameters, not approving a design document that lists them.
This slows the project down slightly at the beginning. Every partner will tell you that. And they’re right. But it accelerates everything after go-live, because your team actually knows what they built and why. The IT leaders I’ve worked with who insist on this approach consistently spend less on external support in the 12 months after go-live. Significantly less.
Make your internal team lead UAT, not just participate. User Acceptance Testing is the best learning opportunity in the entire project. When your team designs the test scripts, executes them, troubleshoots the failures, and documents the results, they build capability that no training session can replicate. If the partner is running UAT and your team is just clicking through scripts someone else wrote, you’ve missed the single best chance to build your internal D365 F&O team.
Require your team to deliver the end-user training. Nothing exposes knowledge gaps faster than having to teach someone else. If your internal Finance lead can’t train the AP team on the new invoice process in D365, that’s a gap you need to fill before go-live, not after. This also builds credibility. When your end users see that an internal person can answer their questions, they trust the system more. Trust is an underrated currency in ERP implementations.
Use external experts strategically, not as a crutch
None of this means you shouldn’t use external D365 F&O experts. You absolutely should. The question is how.
The best approach I’ve seen is what I’d call a “teach and transfer” model. You bring in an external expert for a specific capability gap, with a defined scope and a clear handover plan. Not an open-ended engagement where the consultant does the work and your team watches.
For example. Your internal team doesn’t know how to configure Advanced Warehouse Management in D365. Why would they!? You bring in an independent WMS specialist for 8-12 weeks. During those weeks, they configure the system alongside your internal warehouse lead. Your person is in the system every day, making changes, making mistakes, learning the logic. At the end of the engagement, your warehouse lead can handle 60-70% of WMS configuration changes independently. Much better than 0%, right? The specialist leaves behind documentation, but more importantly, they leave behind a person who actually understands the system.
Compare that to the alternative. You engage the partner for WMS configuration. Their consultant does it. Your team reviews the design document and signs off. After go-live, any WMS change requires a partner ticket, a scoping call, and a billing cycle. For years.
Independent contractors are particularly effective for this kind of targeted capability building. They don’t have a practice to feed or a bench to fill. Their success is measured by whether your team can operate independently after they leave. That’s a fundamentally different incentive than a partner whose revenue depends on your ongoing dependency (sorry partners :D). We covered this dynamic in detail in The Power Buyer’s Guide to Choosing Your D365 ERP Implementation Partner.
The “shadow team” approach that actually works
Another effective model I’ve seen for building an internal D365 F&O team is what some organisations call a “shadow team.” It’s simple in concept, but requires commitment from IT leadership to protect. And buy-in from the business.
For every external consultant on the project, you assign an internal person as their shadow. Not a full-time project resource necessarily, but someone who is present for every key decision, every Functional Design Document, every configuration session, every testing cycle for their module. They have access to the same environments. They’re making changes in the system alongside the consultant. They’re asking “why did you configure it that way?” constantly.
The shadow team approach works because learning happens through doing, not watching. After 6-12 months of working alongside a D365 Finance specialist, your internal Finance lead has seen every configuration decision, understood the trade-offs, and built the muscle memory to operate the system independently.
The challenge is protecting these people’s time. Their managers will want them back on their regular work. Other priorities will compete for their attention. This is where you, as the VP of IT, have to be firm. If you pull your shadow team members back to their day jobs during the implementation, you lose the capability building and you’ll pay for it in external consulting fees for years afterward.
Budget for backfill. Hire temps or redistribute work. Whatever it takes. The cost of protecting your shadow team during the implementation is a fraction of what you’ll spend on external support if you don’t.
Developing your internal D365 F&O team after go-live
Internal D365 F&O team building doesn’t stop at go-live. In fact, the first 6 months after go-live is when the most valuable learning happens, because your team is dealing with real transactions, real exceptions, and real users.
During this period, keep at least one experienced external D365 F&O resource embedded with your team. Not to do the work. To coach. When your internal Finance lead encounters something they haven’t seen before, they have someone to ask. When your Supply Chain owner needs to adjust a planning parameter, someone is there to guide them through it the first time so they can do it independently the next time. A fractional Solution Architect might be a good idea here.
This is a fundamentally different engagement model than traditional post go-live support, where the partner runs a ticket queue and your team submits requests. That model builds dependency. The coaching model builds capability. It costs the same or less, and the ROI compounds over time because every issue your team resolves independently is one you never pay an external rate for again.
We covered the broader post go-live strategy in D365 F&O Post Go-Live: Why the First 6 Months Define Your ROI.
Measure it. Report on it. Protect it.
If you don’t invest in your internal D365 F&O team, capability will erode. People leave. Priorities shift. The team that was confident at the 6 month mark starts losing ground by month 18 if nobody is paying attention.
Track simple metrics with simple questions:
- How many configuration changes were handled internally versus externally this quarter?
- What’s the average time to resolve a D365 support ticket internally?
- How many reports were built by your team versus requested from a partner?
- Are your module owners still getting development time, or have they been fully absorbed back into their operational roles?
Report these to your leadership team. Not as vanity metrics. As cost avoidance. Every configuration change your team handles internally is a partner engagement you didn’t pay for. Every report your team builds is $5K-$15K you didn’t spend. Over 3-5 years, the compound savings of a capable internal team versus permanent partner dependency is enormous.
And when your CFO asks why you’re requesting budget for training, D365 conferences, certifications, or a dedicated D365 support role, you have the data to justify it. Not as an expense. As an investment that’s already paying for itself.
The decision only a VP of IT can make (or a CIO!)
Building your internal D365 F&O team while using external experts is a leadership decision. It requires you to structure the project differently, protect your team’s time, budget for backfill, choose engagement models that prioritise knowledge transfer over speed, and measure the results over years, not weeks.
Nobody else in the organisation will drive this. Your partner won’t, because their business model benefits from your dependency. Your project manager won’t, because their focus is go-live. Your team won’t, because they’re overwhelmed and don’t have the authority to demand co-configuration time.
This one is on you. And the IT leaders who get it right build teams that can run, maintain, and improve D365 for years without calling for help every time something changes.
If you haven’t started these conversations internally yet, and you’re already in an implementation or about to start one, the questions in 5 Questions to Answer Before You Talk to Any D365 F&O Vendor will help you get your house in order first.
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