Monthly Archives: August 2010

Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey 2010

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imageNigel Frank International, a UK based niche recruitment agency specializing in ERP/CRM staffing, has just launched the new Salary Survey 2010. Their Salary Survey of 2009 was a very successful initiative, with more than 7000 responses.

The survey focuses on Microsoft Dynamics professionals from all over the world and benchmarks current trends in Microsoft Dynamics job market.

The survey is fairly short and will only take a couple of minutes to respond. Every participant will receive a free copy of Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey 2010 Report (worth $350 in value) and whoever responds by September 17 automatically enters a prize draw to win an Apple iPad 64GB. Cool folks there at Nigel Frank.

To respond to the survey, please follow this link: Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey 2010.

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Sure Step in action: business process change

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Service Providers (or colloquially partners) often refrain from undertaking organization or process changes during implementation projects of Microsoft Dynamics solutions. And it comes as no surprise: there are many risks related to it, and customizations are taken as a more traditional approach.

Customizations are easy to predict, they do come at risk, but at least the risks are known and often easily managed entirely within service provider’s organization and reach, while organizational change is unpredictable, and often exceeds consultants’ knowledge, experience and expertise.

However, with or without intention or consent, organizational change will always happen. No solution has ever been 100% fit, and since the customer must do their business with the solution, the remainder from fit to 100% will always and without exception be satisfied with an unmanaged, unintentional, but evolutionary process change.

Instead of leaving it all to chance, Sure Step offers much better ways.

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Sure Step in action: a blurry Degree of Fit?

  • Reading time:4 mins read

image Sometimes the Degree of Fit might seem like comparing apples and oranges. With 90 extremely detailed fits, and 10 high-level gaps, the degree of fit seems high, but it isn’t. 90 extremely detailed gaps, and 10 high-level fits, make the degree of fit seem low. In either case the degree of fit is unreliable and it doesn’t tell you anything at all.

For a degree of fit to be reliable, all the requirements should be specified roughly on the same level of detailedness. If they aren’t, you might have an extremely risky project before you, and you just don’t see it. Or you might have a slam dunk, and you stand scared to death by the non-existent risks you see all over.

In situations such as these you have to level the requirements to get a more meaningful figure, otherwise your Fit Gap Analysis doesn’t serve its purpose.

But how exactly do you tell apples from oranges in a requirements list?

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Sure Step Proficiency Assessment

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Microsoft Partner Network Many of my Sure Step students have asked me if there are any practice tests, like MeasaureUp, available for Sure Step exam (MB5-858). I used to say “no”, but that has just changed. I somehow missed this, and I am not exactly sure when it appeared, but there is an online knowledge assessment tool which can help you decide whether to take the exam, or to prepare better instead.

The tool is called Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Proficiency Assessment and is available here.

The prerequisites to access the tool are a Windows Live account, and access to Microsoft Partner Network. Since exam targets Microsoft Partners, I’m pretty sure all partners already have access. If you don’t have the access already, just click the link and it will guide you through the process of linking your Windows Live account with your Partner account.

Good luck on the exam!

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4 strategies for a favorable Degree of Fit

  • Reading time:8 mins read

If your Degree of Fit is just not there, or the balance between it and the budgetary estimate is not favorable, the risk that project will exceed the budget or not meet the requirements is high, but you might still decide to go on. In fact, most consultants often do, choosing to fight the odds. According to field reports, this approach often fails.

There are four things you can do to ensure the customer satisfaction while keeping the project in budget and still reducing the risks by increasing the degree of fit.

Let’s see what they are.

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Sure Step in action: more about Fit Gap Analysis

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image Fit Gap Analysis is one of the core activities of the Sure Step. It’s in fact so important that on most projects this activity should be done twice: the first time you do it on a very high level just get a quick overview of customer’s processes and requirements, and the second time you dive deep down into details to figure out everything.

This is not the first time I blog about it. I explained the meaning of the Degree of Fit, as well as its value in determining the risks of customizing the solution, and then I shared some thoughts about how to use hourly estimates from the Fit Gap worksheet. But every time I think of Fit Gap or I teach it at a course, there seems to be so much more to it.

There are a couple of more points I’d like to address about it:

  • How (and why) to engineer the Degree of Fit?
  • Isn’t the Degree of Fit a bit too blurry?
  • Are the five fit/gap categories really all there is about it?
  • Can you inherit a Fit Gap Analysis results from another consultant?

Let’s discuss the first topic today: engineering a desirable Degree of Fit.

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Challenge of the year: Reviving the blog

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image I woke up this morning and checked my to-do list for today. Business, business, business, and some more business. And yet it seems that my to-do list never goes blank, a couple of customers or projects are always in the backlog. I don’t know why exactly, but after opening the browser I typed the address of my blog—something I didn’t do for a long time—and I was stunned.

Almost three months since my last post. The oldest post on my blog’s home page is four months old and counting. I could remember times when a post couldn’t survive four days on my home page. My blog wasn’t dormant, it seemed downright dead.

Continue ReadingChallenge of the year: Reviving the blog