SAP

Convergence? Divergence. I’m sitting in Aquarius conference room in Clarion Conference Hotel, Prague, attending a presentation about discrete manufacturing at the Partner Day of the Convergence 2010 Europe event in Prague.

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?

“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 .

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.

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.

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.

Few days ago, when I wrote about Navision, I made an on-purpose mistake: I kept talking about, well, Navision. It’s wrong. And it’s not. The story is not very short, but let me strip it down to the bone. Navision was a Danish company, whose flagship product, also named Navision, was the European ERP market leader for small and medium sized companies.

I first heared about Navision five years ago, when I was working as a .NET developer on a web shop project. One of my tasks was to integrate the ordering functionality with customer’s existing system using the fixed format document exchange.