Standard

One of the biggest obstacles of the ERP projects is the language. Not the spoken language, such as Spanish or German, but the lingo of the business, of the branch, of the company. The consultants speak their lingo. The customer speaks theirs. Especially in the early stages, the projects can fall apart on understanding each other.

Service Providers (or colloquially partners ) often refrain from undertaking organization or process changes during implementation projects of Microsoft Dynamics solutions. And it comes as no surprise: there are many risks related to it, and customizations are taken as a more traditional approach.

Requirements and process review is one of the decision accelerators in the Diagnostic phase of the Sure Step, aimed at gaining deeper understanding of customer’s business processes, and documenting high level requirements, as well as possible implementation issues.

Microsoft’s Sure Step team has been pretty busy recently. They have just published the new update to Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology, which includes several important new features and many content updates worth your attention. I’ve just downloaded and installed it and I am impressed with the improvements.

Last Friday, while enjoying a not-at-all healthy Salisbury steak with cheese, I had an interesting discussion with a partner: should NAV consultancies create default databases? A default database (in this context) is a packaged solution built upon standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV, where a…

One of many improvements the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology has brought along is the revised purpose of the Functional Requirements Document (FRD) . This document has long served as cornerstone of every Analysis process of every implementation project: it was the main…

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.

Four months ago I attended a conference, where I had a chance to listen to Miha Kralj, an architect at Microsoft, talk about architectures. It was one of the best presentations I ever attended, and ever since I had this topic in queue, but never really had chance to write about it.

The biggest jeopardies often lurk where we least expect them. When implementing an ERP system such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, what should be one of our best allies, turns out to be our mortal enemy. It has a simple name: The Standard. Standard processes, standard functionality, standard documents, standard system.

About six months ago, when I was buying a car, a friend of mine, in a typical The Good, the Bad and the Ugly fashion, told me that there were two kinds of cars: good cars, and French cars. I bought a French car.