PMBOK

Microsoft releases Sure Step 2012

  • Reading time:9 mins read

imageA couple of days ago, at a Sure Step 2010 training at Sundsgården, Helsingborg, Sweden, while students were preparing to take the exam, one of the students asks me where she can download Sure Step 2010. I give her the link, but she tells me: “No, that’s Sure Step 2012, I’d like to download 2010”.

That came as a surprise. “No way” – I say – “It hasn’t yet been released.”

Or has it?

And then I check, and almost can’t believe it – it’s really there. I completely missed the tweets, the Facebook announcement, the LinkedIn discussions. It seems that I’m not particularly social nowadays. A quick check of Twitter shows me that there wasn’t too much buzz around it, and most of the blogosphere simply redelivers the same content, which either comes from the official announcement (which I also missed Smile) or from whoever blogged first.

Instead of giving a simple “excited” redelivery of the announcement, here’s my take on Sure Step 2012, what’s new, what’s not new (both sadly and thankfully).

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Sure Step or Sure Wheel?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

Sure Step or Sure Wheel?Almost exactly two years ago, incited by a comment from a reader, I wrote an article in defense of Sure Step: Read My Lips: Why?. The point was: is Sure Step a new methodology, or is it just a wheel reinvented?

After having taught about a dozen of Sure Step courses all over Europe (and just preparing to take my flight to Århus, Denmark to teach the next one), I’ve decided to prepare an overview of how Sure Step aligns with other methodologies. Students often ask me about this, and often come with previous knowledge of existing methodologies. Being able to map your existing knowledge to Sure Step will be of great help to learn and understand Sure Step in the future.

So, here is a little reverse-engineering of Sure Step from methodology point of view, and an overview of how it aligns specifically with MSSP, MSF, PMBOK, Scrum and MOF.

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What’s a project plan?

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Project plan. A fancy term we all like to use. But believe it or not, most of us don’t even know what a project plan really is.

I don’t know why, how and when it came to be that in IT we started using the term project plan, but whatever the origin, the term we use is somewhat incorrect, and when attached to what we often attach it to, it’s downright wrong.

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Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success: a review of a sort

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Hollywood Secrets of Project Management SuccessTake that project you are currently running, and imagine, just for a second, that it came with only 3% budget overrun. Most of people in software industry would call it wild success.

In motion picture industry, however, trampling measly 2% or 3% over initial budget would be considered a failure.

While movie industry and software industry are seemingly light years apart, there are many things these two have in common, and there are obviously many things we can learn from them.

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Disruptive nature of ERP projects

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Many project management authorities assert that from project management stance all projects are equal. I dare saying that some projects are more equal than others.

In my last post, I argued why I believe software (and ERP) projects are different. But something came to my mind today, and it’s really an important differentiator of ERP projects from other kinds of projects.

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Is an ERP implementation project just a project?

  • Reading time:5 mins read

image “Software projects are no different from other projects”.

This statement is being repeated over and over at project management courses and seminars, even endorsed in books.

It’s true that software (and ERP implementation, as a subset of software) projects have many traits in common with projects in other disciplines. But ignoring their specifics is almost as wrong as saying that software projects are completely different than other projects.

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We don’t wear shoes, we use footwear!

  • Reading time:6 mins read

(A short, almost pointless rant about PMBOK vs. Sure Step nonsense)

Once, while preparing an important RFP response, a partner told me they don’t use Sure Step because they use PMI methodology. This made my toenails curl up—when people tell me they are using PMI methodology, they in fact tell me they are using no methodology at all. It’s simple:

  1. There is no such thing as PMI methodology
  2. Anybody familiar with PMI should know that

Another time a partner told me they preferred PMBOK to Sure Step. Now, while this was a better argument, it was still very much wrong. As if they told me they don’t wear shoes, because they wear footwear.

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What’s New In Sure Step: Functional Requirements Document

  • Reading time:4 mins read

One of many improvements the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology has brought along is the revised purpose of the Functional Requirements Document (FRD). This document has long served as cornerstone of every Analysis process of every implementation project: it was the main deliverable of the Analysis phase and it both documented customer’s requirements and explained how they will be met with Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution.

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Read My Lips: Why?

  • Reading time:6 mins read

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.

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