Today at Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, during his keynote speech, Doug Kennedy, Vice President Dynamics Partner Team, announced the availability of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step to all Microsoft Dynamics partners.
So far, Sure Step has only been available to partners enrolled in a service plan, which was a big obstacle to smaller or new partner companies who saw investment in a service plan as a significant expenditure.
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?
Microsoft’s Sure Step team has been pretty busy recently. They have just published the new update to Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology, which includes several important new features and many content updates worth your attention.
I’ve just downloaded and installed it and I am impressed with the improvements.
Another one’s down, so let me give it a quick glance over my shoulder before I move on: March 2009.
This was the best month ever for this blog: it has seen most posts from me, most visits from you, most subscribers to the feed, and I’ve covered a wide range of topics which I am not yet sure if it has got me or lost me more visitors.
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.
Prescriptive methodologies, such as Sure Step, are double-edged swords. They are aimed at increasing repeatability, consistency, traceability, manageability and more of your projects, yet they seemingly increase overhead and contribute to an inflated project price tag.
As a result, companies sometimes offer excuses such as: it would be too expensive for the customer, or we would lose the project to the competitor, because our price would be too high.
In my opinion, this kind of reasoning is just wrong.
Yesterday I delivered a presentation about benefits of Sure Step methodology, as a part of an internal partner academy program. The audience was fantastically interactive, and if anyone of you who participated in the event is reading this—thank you!
One of the attendees asked about collaborative use of Sure Step, and whether it is possible to share the Sure Step documents among the team members. I explained that it isn’t, but that there is a third-party SharePoint-based solution which takes Sure Step to a fully collaborative level. I promised to share a link to the webcast which talks about this.
So, here is the link:
http://www.brightwork.com/webcasts/recorded_webcasts.htm
Go, click it, and search for Selling with Sure Step – A Roadmap for Success. It’s the webcast delivered last Thursday by Aditya Mohan, Director of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, and Éamonn McGuinness, CEO of BrightWork, company which specializes in collaborative SharePoint project management solutions, which also developed the Sure Step SharePoint solution.
P.S. Thanks to Dejan from Citius for his fabulous tip: share Sure Step documents using Groove. Simplicity rules.
P.P.S. My five cents: share the source folder of the Sure Step project on the network. It’s kind of ugly, but works.
Implementing a new Microsoft Dynamics solution doesn’t merely introduce a new piece of software into your environment. Yes, the software is an important part, you need to deploy it successfully, configure it as necessary, probably even customize it and change the business logic under the hood.
One component, however, is easily overlooked, and you wouldn’t believe how often it’s not addressed until late. Or too late. It’s the infrastructure.
Infrastructure is tough. It’s not just servers and desktops with some wires, switches and access points in between. Its a lot more. What kind of hardware do you need for your servers or desktops? What kind of performance do you really need? What kind of network layout is optimal for your transaction volume? Should you run the client on desktop machines, or would a remote desktop access be a preferred method? Do you virtualize your servers? What kind of failover capacities do you need? Can you retain any of your old hardware? How many users will use the system? Tomorrow? In five years? What about interfaces and integration to other systems or applications?
A couple of wrong answers, and down you go.
(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.
Happy New Year everybody! Are you ready for it?
When I moved this blog to its new domain NavigateIntoSuccess.com I gave you a commitment I intend to observe: there will be a new post here every Monday and every Thursday. Today is Thursday, so let’s rock’n’roll.