Project management

Methodology is a tough topic. There are good methodologies, there are bad methodologies, there are good methodologies gone bad. Methodology is not a silver bullet, it won’t just make any problems disappear, and is hardly ever the single source of success or failure. But a methodology can be a major contributor to success.

A few days back, while prototyping a new solution for a customer, one of the key users said: “But in our old software it didn’t work like that.” I was about to try to explain why the change, but then the user’s boss said: – We aren’t implementing a new solution so that everything can stay the way it was.

A new version of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology was released yesterday and is available for download to all Microsoft Dynamics partners enrolled in a service plan. If you were a partner, and thought you had no reason to enroll in one before, now there is a compelling reason to do so.

It’s a well known fact that IT projects fail every so often. Standish Group has been researching the success and failure factors of IT projects for a decade and a half, and they publish their results in their CHAOS report every two years or so.