4 strategies for a favorable Degree of Fit

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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.

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A new book about Microsoft Dynamics NAV

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Back in my time (now I feel old :)) if you wanted to read a book about Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you just couldn’t—there wasn’t any available. Today, if you want to learn about NAV, not only there are books about programming and implementing, but with new Mark Brummel’s book you can now learn about the most important aspect of Microsoft Dynamics NAV customization projects—the application design. The book hasn’t yet been published, but is already available for preorder through PACKT Publishing at the following link: Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Application Design.

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Cloud computing – what is it anyway?

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image Not even a full day after having delivered my presentation about the possibilities of Cloud Computing in the context of Microsoft Dynamics NAV at Decisions 2010 virtual conference by MSDynamicsWorld.com (which by the way you can still access on-demand if you missed it), my friend Steve has forwarded me a Forrester Research article published on ZDNet by James Staten: Could cloud computing get any more confusing?

A great read and a fantastic short analysis of what is and what isn’t the so-much-talked-about Cloud computing.

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