March 2009

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Swallowing it all at once might be tempting as it has all the potential you need to get into the next edition of Guinness World Records . Likewise, trying it with an ERP implementation has all the potential you need to get into to the next edition of Chaos Report .

“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 .

Many people have asked me about availability of a downloadable Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 demo. Unless you are an existing Microsoft Dynamics NAV customer on a support plan, or a Microsoft Dynamics partner, you can’t download a demo version from a public Microsoft web site.

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 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.

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.

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!

Last week I delivered the C/SIDE Development course for partner community in Zagreb . As always, questions abound afterwards. Today, I’ve got a question from an attendee: “What’s the best way to print a report in multiple languages?”. Up front: this is NOT a technical post.

For a long time, the ruler of project reports was Standish Group ’s (in)famous Chaos report, which analyzed IT project success/failure factors. While many of the Chaos report’s findings applied to ERP implementation, the report as a whole was primarily about software development projects.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV blogosphere wasn’t particularly active in February. Trust me, I don’t blame anyone for it. February is a slow month. Economy is down, forests are burning in Australia, planes are crashing in Netherlands. Whatever the reason, NAV bloggers weren’t as active in February, as they were in January.