2009 – Page 9 – Vjeko.com

2nd rule of agile ERP: deploy gradually

Post published:March 18, 2009
Post comments:8 Comments
Reading time:5 mins read

How 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

Post published:March 17, 2009
Post comments:12 Comments
Reading time:5 mins read

“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

Post published:March 16, 2009
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Reading time:4 mins read

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

Post published:March 16, 2009
Post comments:6 Comments
Reading time:5 mins read

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?

Post published:March 12, 2009
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Reading time:4 mins read

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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