Last week I participated in a discussion about budgets and whether you should ask your potential customers their budget. It made me think: how often do customers reveal their project budgets before the consultants bid?
From my personal experience—not too often. What a waste! Of time, money, and opportunity.
(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:
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.
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.
Where I have been for the past eight months…
This blog started enthusiastically, I had as many as 14 posts per month. Taking into account that blogging was only a hobby, I blogged like crazy. Then I went silent.
No, I wasn’t tired from blogging, I didn’t experience a writer’s block, quite the contrary! I was working on a project. A top secret one. Now it has been done, and here are the results: a book called Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.
(A short rant about eye-contact-based specifications.)
In short, there is no such things as an eye-contact-based specification. And for a reason.
While kicking-off of a project, we had a discussion with the customer about the change management approach, and specification detail.
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.
Some time back, as I was riding a taxi from Prague airport to Holiday Inn hotel, I wondered about the fixed price I was about to pay for the ride.
– “Airport to city is 700 flat.” – said the driver when I asked how much approximately will it cost.
Common wisdom goes that flat rates mean you get it worse than if it wasn’t flat. Indeed, if it was on meter, and if the driver took the shortest route (I had a GPS device on me, I could’ve easily checked it!), the fare would’ve been lower. And yet, I decided I loved the flat rate.
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.