Yearly Archives: 2009

2nd rule of agile ERP: deploy gradually

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Eat an elephantHow do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Swallowing it all at once might be tempting as it has all the potential you need to get into the next edition of Guinness World Records. Likewise, trying it with an ERP implementation has all the potential you need to get into to the next edition of Chaos Report. One way or the other.

ERP software is huge. It contains thousands of features potentially touching every single tiniest aspect of your business. Implementing ERP is about introducing change into your company, and change can be evolutionary, or revolutionary. Your pick.

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1st rule of agile ERP: deploy vanilla ERP

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image“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” That’s the very first principle of the Agile Manifesto.

The problem with ERP is that the first deliveries are all but early: they typically occur only after about twenty months.

Twenty months is a heck of a long time. And value achieved after a twenty-month implementation is often far below expectations.

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Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Test Drive

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Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009

Many people have asked me about availability of a downloadable Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 demo. Unless you are an existing Microsoft Dynamics NAV customer on a support plan, or a Microsoft Dynamics partner, you can’t download a demo version from a public Microsoft web site.

You can download your copy from a community web site though – check the links at the bottom of this post. Be advised that some of the downloads are larger than a gigabyte, which might not be too download friendly.

So, if you can’t download the demo, there is still a great option for trying Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009: go to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Test Drive website at http://www.dynamicsnavtestdrive.com/ and access the online virtual environment where you can try Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 for free.

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5 steps to implement ERP the Agile way

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Roadside waterfall by digitaldust In my previous post I’ve (what, again?) shared some statistics about success and failure rates of software projects in general and ERP projects specifically. It seems that ERP projects fare somewhat worse than generic software projects, which I stated might have a lot to do with how requirements are handled.

Agile is an unpopular word in ERP world. We, the ERP people, love the glory and the thunder of The Waterfall. It has worked for us since forever, after all. Yes, we’ve all seen it fail every so often, but we’ve learned to learn from failure, and we know there is no better approach. Don’t we?

Frankly, I am not completely sure we do.

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Is agile ERP implementation possible?

  • Reading time:3 mins read

image Agile has been gaining momentum among software development methodologies for past decade or so. Various researches and surveys consistently show that software developed under an agile approach is generally better than the software developed under waterfall approaches.

At the core of any agile approach is an assumption that whatever the requirements might be at the beginning of a project, they won’t be the same at the end of the project. The longer the project, the more truth there is in this assumption. To mitigate this situation, agile methodologies start with smaller sets of requirements, they start small and deliver functionality incrementally in a series of releases. No single release covers all requirements, but every release delivers more than the previous one.

With ERP implementations, we generally don’t subscribe to this idea. And at that, we might be wrong.

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How you should learn from Sure Step

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Sword & stone (Excalibur) by Midnight-digital (Not leaving ! Just very busy) (opens in a new window) Prescriptive methodologies, such as Sure Step, are double-edged swords. They are aimed at increasing repeatability, consistency, traceability, manageability and more of your projects, yet they seemingly increase overhead and contribute to an inflated project price tag.

As a result, companies sometimes offer excuses such as: it would be too expensive for the customer, or we would lose the project to the competitor, because our price would be too high.

In my opinion, this kind of reasoning is just wrong.

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Sure Step with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

  • Reading time:1 min read

Yesterday I delivered a presentation about benefits of Sure Step methodology, as a part of an internal partner academy program. The audience was fantastically interactive, and if anyone of you who participated in the event is reading this—thank you!

One of the attendees asked about collaborative use of Sure Step, and whether it is possible to share the Sure Step documents among the team members. I explained that it isn’t, but that there is a third-party SharePoint-based solution which takes Sure Step to a fully collaborative level. I promised to share a link to the webcast which talks about this.

So, here is the link:

http://www.brightwork.com/webcasts/recorded_webcasts.htm

Go, click it, and search for Selling with Sure Step – A Roadmap for Success. It’s the webcast delivered last Thursday by Aditya Mohan, Director of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, and Éamonn McGuinness, CEO of BrightWork, company which specializes in collaborative SharePoint project management solutions, which also developed the Sure Step SharePoint solution.

P.S. Thanks to Dejan from Citius for his fabulous tip: share Sure Step documents using Groove. Simplicity rules.

P.P.S. My five cents: share the source folder of the Sure Step project on the network. It’s kind of ugly, but works.

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Printing NAV reports in different languages

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Last week I delivered the C/SIDE Development course for partner community in Zagreb. As always, questions abound afterwards. Today, I’ve got a question from an attendee: “What’s the best way to print a report in multiple languages?”.

Up front: this is NOT a technical post. It IS about technical solution, but it is primarily about design, usability, standards and best practices. I’ll plain ignore the fact that it does use a few C/SIDE or C/AL references, so please, do likewise 😉

(I said this because I kind of swore not to C/AL around this blog anymore, but again – sometimes I just have to do it.)

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Panorama’s ERP Report reveals important facts

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For a long time, the ruler of project reports was Standish Group’s (in)famous Chaos report, which analyzed IT project success/failure factors. While many of the Chaos report’s findings applied to ERP implementation, the report as a whole was primarily about software development projects. And as we all know, implementing ERP is not the same thing as software development. Hopefully.

Panorama Consulting Group, an independent ERP consulting firm from Denver, Colorado, has conducted a market research in 2008, that explains ERP implementation project success factors and reveals some interesting metrics about real ERP costs, duration and benefits. Finally, we have a decent ERP project report, which reveals some important facts about Microsoft Dynamics.

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What did NAV bloggers say in February?

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image Microsoft Dynamics NAV blogosphere wasn’t particularly active in February. Trust me, I don’t blame anyone for it. February is a slow month.

Economy is down, forests are burning in Australia, planes are crashing in Netherlands. Whatever the reason, NAV bloggers weren’t as active in February, as they were in January.

Still, there were some noteworthy posts, that I’d rather bookmark for the posterity, and if you missed some of them, here is your chance to catch up.

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