“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.
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.
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.
There is a fantastic website that I haven’t been aware of yet: Enterprise Resource Planning: Accelerate Your Business Toward Profit, on Microsoft’s Events and Webcasts portal. Thanks to Fred Mackie for bringing it to my attention.
The website delivers huge amounts of on-demand webcasts for all four Microsoft Dynamics ERP products for existing and prospect customers, but also some valuable content for Microsoft partners.
A short story about maritime trading, steamboats and Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform in short to mid-term ERP and Microsoft Dynamics NAV perspective
This is a story of a business which failed, and it didn’t have to. It had all the capital and resources it needed to grow, it held a solid share in an expanding market. And yet, they failed.
Associazione Marittima di Sabioncello (AMS), or Maritime Society of Pelješac, was a shipping company founded in 1865 in Orebić, a small coastal town of southern Croatia. They grew to a fleet of 33 sailing ships, they shipped worldwide, their business expanded so much that eventually they built their own shipyard. Allegedly, they were one of the biggest and most prosperous maritime merchant companies in the Mediterranean.
And then an innovation came along, which ruined them.
To customize or not to customize, that is the question. When you see a complex business process far from the standard ERP system, a knee-jerk reaction is to reach for customization tools and do the development.
Many ERP theorists say that ERP is only as good as it is an exact match for your processes. And they are mostly right about it. But majority of ERP systems are very generic (Microsoft Dynamics NAV included), and to exactly match your processes, they require customization. When it doesn’t work out-of-the-box, you customize it, it’s that simple, isn’t it?
It’s not, sorry.
One of the major tasks I decided to undertake here on this blog in 2009 was to create a comprehensive Microsoft Dynamics NAV Functionality Catalog.
When you are making a decision to implement any large scale business management or ERP system, it can take dozens of presentations to learn about the functionality, and you might still have a number of questions lingering in the air unanswered. With this functionality catalog I hope to help you deciding on implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV by explaining in detail most important application features, so you can easily get the picture of system out-of-the-box capabilities.
The first round of Microsoft Dynamics NAV Functionality Catalog has been written, giving you basic overview of application areas of Microsoft Dynamics NAV from business processes functionality perspective. It’s going to grow, so do drop by. You can visit the catalog by following this link.
(Three compelling reasons to reshape your business processes, not your software)
Has your computer ever crashed while you were doing something important, causing you to lose all your work? A natural first reaction to this situation is frustration: your work is gone, your effort went in vain, you’ll never do it as well as you did it the first time…
And yet, when initial frustration is gone, and you start doing it over again, from scratch, you are more likely to produce results of higher quality than the first time. Why? The reason for this is simply called—experience.
My dear Loyal Visitor,
Navigate Into Success blog has moved to the new domain:
http://www.NavigateIntoSuccess.com/
I believe it deserved it.
This blog has started as a hobby a year and a half ago. It took it six months before a first visitor arrived to it, and about nine months before it really kicked-off.
Today, there are about 160 daily web visitors, 70 subscribers to my Feedburner feed, and 60 subscribers to WordPress feed – all in all there are almost 300 hundred people reading this stuff every day.
!!! Check out my book Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 !!!
The long awaited Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 has been released for download earlier this week, and has just been publicly announced at Convergence 2008 Copenhagen. If you have PartnerSource access, you can download Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 here.
This one is the most important release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV ever, as it brings a completely new architecture, a shiny new user interface, web-services enablement and much more.