Implementation

“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 .

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.

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.

Implementation is like marriage. For better or worse, you choose a piece of software, take it under your roof and commit to it for a long term, so help you God. And as in marriage, if you want to live happily ever after with your new software, the my way or the highway attitude doesn’t help much—you must be open to compromise.

(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…

The degree of fit is an important indicator of your project’s alignment with the standard functionality. After you determine the degree of fit, and understand what it means for the project, do you just passively accept the findings, or do you do something to make them more favorable?

I’d like to have a BMW X6 . A fantastic car. Only, I’d like it to be convertible, because I love the feel of wind in my hair while driving into summer sunset. I could use a glass roof as well, it makes the interior feel much more spacious.

Recently, a reader, commenting on my last post about Sure Step , pointed me to an article by Karl E. Wiegers “Read My Lips: No New Models!” I initially responded to the comment, but I figure the comments aren’t read as often as posts, so I decided to blog it. It’s doubly funny that the reader is using Dr.

Each phase of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology is equally important in an implementation project. You could argue that analysis is the most important, or that design is the most important, or that operation is less important. I’ll paraphrase Scott Adams here and ask: how one phase can be more important if each of them is completely necessary?