Yearly Archives: 2010

Development best practices – the aftermath

  • Reading time:3 mins read

image So I would guess that was it. I’m just returning to Kristiansand, my Norwegian base, after delivering the “Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Development Best Practices” course to a partner, my first custom-developed training ever. My impression is—mission accomplished.

I was not sure at first how this would turn out. Teaching NAV best practices to people some of whom have more experience than I’ll have any time soon, isn’t an easy thing. The challenge for me was—how to deliver something new, really valuable to those people, something they could go home with saying “wow, if only I knew this earlier”.

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Inventory value in foreign prepayment scenarios

  • Reading time:7 mins read

I have this client who operates in very specific conditions: majority of their vendors are foreign companies which invoice them in a foreign currency (USD) and almost invariably ask for at least 50% prepayment.

NAV can handle prepayments and foreign currencies like a charm—the issue lies elsewhere: the fluctuations of currency exchange rate can easily cause real and tangible losses.

Even though prepayment invoice is fully closed by a prepayment applied against it, the actual costs of goods is not calculated from prepayment invoice, but from the actual invoice. And if there was difference between currency exchange rate at prepayment and invoicing dates, the inventory value reflects the actual invoiced value (instead of the prepaid value), there is currency exchange gain/loss which is fictitious, but taxable.

Thankfully, there are ways to avoid this.

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Development Best Practices

  • Reading time:2 mins read

image “Best practices” is one of those beloved and hated concepts. There are people who just embrace “best” practices for the sake of their bestness. And there are people who just shun them for the very same reason—those know-it-alls who have opinion on everything and know it better before even learning about it. What’s-best-for-you-is-not-best-for-me kind of people. Neither of approaches is actually, well, best.

For a best practice to be the best for you, you need to understand it, and if you find any pitfalls, improve it.

In two days I’m delivering the NAV Development Best Practices training for a service provider in Norway. They approached me two two months ago and asked if could do something like that. This brought to memory some good posts I made years ago, and here I bring the links. If you want me to share my best practices, this would be my starting point:

  • Code of Coding: emphasizes the need for understanding the effects of a change in code, and making others understand your intention
  • Code of coding 2: Documenting changes: about how to document different kind of changes in code, and also about the level of effect a specific type of change has in the long run
  • Code of coding 3: Die, hard(coding)!: about avoiding embedding output text into code
  • Code of coding 4: Die, hard(coding) 2: about avoiding embedding settings into code, with detailed explanation what exactly is wrong with it, and some good guidelines on how to detect less obvious cases of settings hardcoding
  • NeverENDing story: about a very bad example I once encountered, and how to avoid situations such as that
  • Featuritis Cure: now this one is definitely not a “best practice”, it’s about a situation when a developer pulled a prank on a customer so subtly that I just had to share it with the world. A far better cure for Featuritis (a dangerous and ugly disease indeed) is given by Mark Brummel, in his fantastic post Tip #20 – Save Report Usage. If you aren’t yet following Mark’s blog, now would be a good time to start.

If you are interested in development best practices, check these posts, and if you find them useful, then I’m happy. If you don’t, share your thoughts. Best practices develop over time, improving slowly, and gradually until one day they just become the norm.

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Abusing filtering for a lightning fast posting setup

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Classic client has some features which are simply unbeatable when it comes to productivity and speed, one of them being primary-key filtering. When you set a single-value filter on primary key fields in a table, and then insert a new record in the same table, primary key fields are automatically populated with values from the filter.

Yeah, and?

Well, there are so many ways to (ab)use this feature, that sometimes it has a potential to save ridiculous amounts of time. As it just did for me, so I felt an irresistible urge to share it with you. Even though it is so ridiculously simple.

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Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey 2010

  • Reading time:1 min read

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

  • Reading time:1 min read

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

  • Reading time:5 mins read

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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