Project plan. A fancy term we all like to use. But believe it or not, most of us don’t even know what a project plan really is.
I don’t know why, how and when it came to be that in IT we started using the term project plan, but whatever the origin, the term we use is somewhat incorrect, and when attached to what we often attach it to, it’s downright wrong.
Take that project you are currently running, and imagine, just for a second, that it came with only 3% budget overrun. Most of people in software industry would call it wild success.
In motion picture industry, however, trampling measly 2% or 3% over initial budget would be considered a failure.
While movie industry and software industry are seemingly light years apart, there are many things these two have in common, and there are obviously many things we can learn from them.
Many project management authorities assert that from project management stance all projects are equal. I dare saying that some projects are more equal than others.
In my last post, I argued why I believe software (and ERP) projects are different. But something came to my mind today, and it’s really an important differentiator of ERP projects from other kinds of projects.
“Software projects are no different from other projects”.
This statement is being repeated over and over at project management courses and seminars, even endorsed in books.
It’s true that software (and ERP implementation, as a subset of software) projects have many traits in common with projects in other disciplines. But ignoring their specifics is almost as wrong as saying that software projects are completely different than other projects.
NavigateIntoSuccess.comis currently down due to DNS issues with my current domain registrar. I’ve already initiated the transfer to another one, but until the problem is fully resolved and depending on your ISP’s DNS cache policies, you might experience intermittent downtimes or network errors while accessing my blog. I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused to you.
Thank you for your patience and understanding!
Spring has come. You can tell it. Okay, to be totally honest, nature and weather, at least over here at my place, haven’t done their part (yet), but NAV blogs have for sure made up for that. A lot of dormant blogs have awaken, some have erupted, and there were a lot of good stuff to read from my fellow NAV bloggers in March 2009.
All good things come to an end, and that’s exactly what seems to have happened with Convergence EMEA, the key Microsoft Dynamics conference in Europe. The news has hit hard with me; I’ve only attended it once, and now that it was to come so close to my hometown, it’s been cancelled.
Microsoft’s Sure Step team has been pretty busy recently. They have just published the new update to Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology, which includes several important new features and many content updates worth your attention.
I’ve just downloaded and installed it and I am impressed with the improvements.
Another one’s down, so let me give it a quick glance over my shoulder before I move on: March 2009.
This was the best month ever for this blog: it has seen most posts from me, most visits from you, most subscribers to the feed, and I’ve covered a wide range of topics which I am not yet sure if it has got me or lost me more visitors.
“Eat your own dog food”—they say around here. If it was always this yummy, I’d do it every day.
Yesterday, I’ve got my laptop upgraded to Windows 7 Beta. I’ve loved betas ever since I became a geek. Once a geek, always a geek, and although nowadays I primarily do consulting or project management, the geek inside me pops out his head through the necktie every now and then. When new versions of products come out, he goes bananas.