Sure Step

Adriatics Dynamics Community

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mbscommzgIt’s the second “me too” today. Waldo has started the day with announcing the new season of the Belgian Dynamics Community, which was me-too-ed by Marq announcing the Dutch Dynamics Community. It’s my turn now to me-too the announcement of the Adriatics Dynamics Community. Three community announcements in a day—now that’s something!

I call this community Adriatics, because it won’t be limited only to Croatia—the idea is to spread it to other neighboring countries: Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia. We kick it off in Zagreb on October 4th, with the theme of upcoming localization of NAV 2009 SP1 and Sure Step 2010.

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Solution overview: hablamos tutti die gleiche language?

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One of the biggest obstacles of the ERP projects is the language. Not the spoken language, such as Spanish or German, but the lingo of the business, of the branch, of the company. The consultants speak their lingo. The customer speaks theirs. Especially in the early stages, the projects can fall apart on understanding each other.

If there is one profound risk that all ERP projects share, it’s that during requirement analysis and early stages of design the consultant won’t understand the customer’s need, and that the customer won’t really understand what consultant is proposing. A bad choice, and there goes another failed project.

Luckily, there is a tool in Sure Step which is used specifically to eliminate this risk of misunderstanding: the Solution Overview.

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Sure Step or Sure Wheel?

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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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10 reasons that make design absolutely necessary

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Unfinished buildings, by net_efekt (on Flickr)Design is one of a kind. Other phases in Sure Step are understood and accepted as good and necessary. But design, do we really do that? Is it really necessary? Who’s going to pay for it? Does the customer really need all those documents? Instead of writing documents, you could have it developed in the same, or less time. And so on and so forth.

As a matter of fact, if you asked me to pick one single most important phase in a Sure Step project, then it’s the design. No second thoughts here, whatsoever.

Here I list the ten most important reasons that I believe make design absolutely indispensable.

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Sure Step in action: business process change

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Service Providers (or colloquially partners) often refrain from undertaking organization or process changes during implementation projects of Microsoft Dynamics solutions. And it comes as no surprise: there are many risks related to it, and customizations are taken as a more traditional approach.

Customizations are easy to predict, they do come at risk, but at least the risks are known and often easily managed entirely within service provider’s organization and reach, while organizational change is unpredictable, and often exceeds consultants’ knowledge, experience and expertise.

However, with or without intention or consent, organizational change will always happen. No solution has ever been 100% fit, and since the customer must do their business with the solution, the remainder from fit to 100% will always and without exception be satisfied with an unmanaged, unintentional, but evolutionary process change.

Instead of leaving it all to chance, Sure Step offers much better ways.

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