[xhedley]

Realise that you will be a translator who is paid to understand the technical enough and the business enough that the project can have a conversation.

As far as tools and methodologies - you have to use what your customers use to communicate. It may just be emails as some of the other commenters have said - have a meeting, write up the notes, email the notes.

Once you are past design stage and into user acceptance test and go live you will need an issue tracking tool. Maybe your customer’s IT department has a help desk system that you can integrate with. Be very cautious of using unsecured SAAS products - only document security issues about your implementation on Google sheets if you are 100% confident of who can see it. I am never that confident and want to work somewhere the customer’s IT security is happy with.

I would recommend the book Flawless Consulting by Peter Block. It’s about management consulting at a more senior level than implementation consulting but the points about agreeing with the customer what they need to provide to you for you to do your job are very valuable.

You need to explain to your customer the consequences of choices. Sales are often happy to say “yes we can build that”. But really the standard configuration takes 1 month to implement, 30 custom features take much longer.

Disclaimer I moved from functional into implementation (accountant into implementing finance systems) which is different from technical into implementation.

[curiosweti]

Yes, thank you for giving a heads up over the security issue especially for a startup working on data privacy