Access developers are in a unique situation. Larger projects on different platforms break down the tasks into multiple steps and multiple people are involved, starting with the initial analyst. This person/team interviews the users and gathers requirements including sources of data and ultimate outputs. The requirements go to a design team and they layout the solution and break it into manageable parts. Then we move on to the development team/teams and they take the high level design and break it down into pieces that can be implemented. After each part has been unit tested by the original developer, the parts are tested by the test team and then integrated into the larger application. Once pieces that can be understood by the users become available, we start user testing. After all the testing is done and everyone signs off, we then distribute to a large pool of testers to do a stress test and only after that is done can we release the app to the general population. And that takes yet another group of people. One of my clients, Sikorsky Helicopters, maker of Marine 1, has seven levels of testing before anything ever gets into production.
Access developers are responsible for everything except user testing. It is rare that a large project developer will ever even talk to a user so he can say, let's make an app to do x. But Access developers are more integrated into the user community and have a much better appreciation of the large picture ( or should) and so Access developers actually do make suggestions for new apps that can help their department.
This makes Access developers jacks of all trades and therefore to be successful, they are required to think well beyond the technical details of the task in front of them.