“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.
For a long time, the ruler of project reports was Standish Group’s (in)famous Chaos report, which analyzed IT project success/failure factors. While many of the Chaos report’s findings applied to ERP implementation, the report as a whole was primarily about software development projects. And as we all know, implementing ERP is not the same thing as software development. Hopefully.
Panorama Consulting Group, an independent ERP consulting firm from Denver, Colorado, has conducted a market research in 2008, that explains ERP implementation project success factors and reveals some interesting metrics about real ERP costs, duration and benefits. Finally, we have a decent ERP project report, which reveals some important facts about Microsoft Dynamics.
Implementation is like marriage. For better or worse, you choose a piece of software, take it under your roof and commit to it for a long term, so help you God.
And as in marriage, if you want to live happily ever after with your new software, the my way or the highway attitude doesn’t help much—you must be open to compromise.
Last Monday, I argued for avoiding customizations if at all possible, an argument I stand by firmly. It’s like forcing your wife to color her hair pink. I don’t know about your wife, but mine doesn’t color her hair pink. If you like it pink, it’s probably something to think about before turning your yes in.
But NAV is NAV, isn’t it? It has what it has, and if I need it different, I have to customize it, right?
Wrong. You can compromise.
(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.
The degree of fit is an important indicator of your project’s alignment with the standard functionality.
After you determine the degree of fit, and understand what it means for the project, do you just passively accept the findings, or do you do something to make them more favorable?
I’d like to have a BMW X6. A fantastic car. Only, I’d like it to be convertible, because I love the feel of wind in my hair while driving into summer sunset. I could use a glass roof as well, it makes the interior feel much more spacious. And of course, it can’t have that automatic transmission—I don’t care if it’s not a hybrid car, it simply must have the continuously variable transmission, no matter the cost.
I’ll never have a car like this.
Recently, a reader, commenting on my last post about Sure Step, pointed me to an article by Karl E. Wiegers
“Read My Lips: No New Models!” I initially responded to the comment, but I figure the comments aren’t read as often as posts, so I decided to blog it.
It’s doubly funny that the reader is using Dr. Wiegers to devalue and dismiss Sure Step: firstly, the article has really nothing to do with implementation methodologies at all, and secondly, when I delivered Sure Step training at WinDays pre-conf earlier this year, I gave to each attendant a copy of Karl E. Wiegers’s latest book “Practical Project Initiation”—at the time it was the best book available that matched both the message of my training and the point of Sure Step as a methodology.
Each phase of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology is equally important in an implementation project. You could argue that analysis is the most important, or that design is the most important, or that operation is less important. I’ll paraphrase Scott Adams here and ask: how one phase can be more important if each of them is completely necessary? Well, except for Diagnostic phase.