Success

4 strategies for a favorable Degree of Fit

  • Reading time:8 mins read

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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My book featured on MSDynamicsWorld.com

  • Reading time:1 min read

Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 by David Roys and Vjekoslav Babić (opens in a new window)MSDynamicsWorld.com has just posted an excerpt from my friend Dave’s and my book Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, delivering some content from chapter 4, focusing on the implementation process. The Chapter 4 draws a lot of its content from Sure Step best practices, and the fact that MSDynamicsWorld.com has decided to post this content on their website shows how important a standard methodology is for a successful implementation project.

This excerpt is only the first part of a series of two articles, and the next one is due to follow soon. I’ll make sure to let you know about it.

Anyway, the book so far has been received pretty well, we’ve got a lot of good feedback, and Amazon.com sales rank consistently shows the audience likes it a lot. Have you got yourself a copy already?

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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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1st rule of agile ERP: deploy vanilla ERP

  • Reading time:4 mins read

image“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.

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5 steps to implement ERP the Agile way

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Roadside waterfall by digitaldust 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.

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Is agile ERP implementation possible?

  • Reading time:3 mins read

image 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.

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A look back: February 2009

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Another month is over, and in my recently established tradition, I’m taking a look back at the past month to give you an overview of developments around NavigateIntoSuccess.com.

This was both a great month, and a rough month for me. Rough, because I had terrible hosting issues, and great because in spite of that, you visited this blog regularly and engaged in discussions more than ever before. Thanks!

So, let’s take a short overview of what this blog did in February 2009.

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How to prevent failure: project education

  • Reading time:3 mins read

According to Standish Group, top causes of failed IT project are these:

  • lack of end-user engagement,
  • unclear specification,
  • changes in scope,
  • lack of management support,
  • lack of planning,
  • unrealistic and unclear goals.

I haven’t seen too many failed Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementation projects, but those that I did see fail, have failed precisely for a selection of these reasons.

Take a closer look at the list above. Doesn’t it seem that the blame lays mostly on the customer? But is it really customer’s fault?

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Starting it from scratch – do you dare?

  • Reading time:6 mins read

(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.

Continue ReadingStarting it from scratch – do you dare?