April 2009

If projects were completely predictable, there would be no need for risk management . Everything could be planned and executed according to plan. However, we know better. Unexpected things happen, disrupt the original plans and cause time and cost overruns. In IT projects, these overruns are far too common to be ignored.

WinDays9 is over, thank you all who attended my presentation “What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009”. I hope it was worth your time. For all you lucky ones, I hope you liked the book! I would prefer if I had enough of them to give you each a copy, but let’s just say I was logistically impaired.

Panorama Consulting Group , the authors of the ERP report , have just made available two interesting tools: ERP Quick Diagnostic, and ERP Readiness Assessment. According to their website, if you are “in the early stages of selecting a new ERP software or if you’ve already completed your project, our ERP Quick Diagnostic will help you benchmark with other ERP projects across the globe”.

Often you don’t even notice how quickly time goes by, except for a few milestones, which happen once a year and remind you that another one’s over. WinDays conference is one of such milestones, and I’ve barely published a handful of posts here since the last time it was the most discussed topic in Croatian IT community.

I’ve just got the news about Part III of Panorama’s ERP Report in my inbox. If you missed my analysis of the report , please read it first: part three builds on findings of the first two. I know that I am biased when writing about this, but how can I not be?

Project plan. A fancy term we all like to use. But believe it or not, most of us don’t even know what a project plan really is. I don’t know why, how and when it came to be that in IT we started using the term project plan , but whatever the origin, the term we use is somewhat incorrect, and when attached to what we often attach it to, it’s downright wrong.

Take that project you are currently running, and imagine, just for a second, that it came with only 3% budget overrun. Most of people in software industry would call it wild success. In motion picture industry, however, trampling measly 2% or 3% over initial budget would be considered a failure.

Many project management authorities assert that from project management stance all projects are equal. I dare saying that some projects are more equal than others. In my last post , I argued why I believe software (and ERP) projects are different.

“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.