Sure Step

Today at Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, during his keynote speech, Doug Kennedy, Vice President Dynamics Partner Team, announced the availability of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step to all Microsoft Dynamics partners.

MSDynamicsWorld.com has just posted an excerpt from my friend Dave’s and my book Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, delivering some content from chapter 4, focusing on the implementation process. The Chapter 4 draws a lot of its content from Sure Step best practices, and the fact that…

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.

Another one’s down, so let me give it a quick glance over my shoulder before I move on: March 2009. This was the best month ever for this blog: it has seen most posts from me, most visits from you, most subscribers to the feed , and I’ve covered a wide range of topics which I am not yet sure if it has got me or lost me more visitors.

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.

Prescriptive methodologies, such as Sure Step, are double-edged swords. They are aimed at increasing repeatability, consistency, traceability, manageability and more of your projects, yet they seemingly increase overhead and contribute to an inflated project price tag.

Yesterday I delivered a presentation about benefits of Sure Step methodology, as a part of an internal partner academy program. The audience was fantastically interactive, and if anyone of you who participated in the event is reading this—thank you!

Implementing a new Microsoft Dynamics solution doesn’t merely introduce a new piece of software into your environment. Yes, the software is an important part, you need to deploy it successfully, configure it as necessary, probably even customize it and change the business logic under the hood.

(A short, almost pointless rant about PMBOK vs. Sure Step nonsense) Once, while preparing an important RFP response, a partner told me they don’t use Sure Step because they use PMI methodology . This made my toenails curl up—when people tell me they are using PMI methodology , they in fact tell me they are using no methodology at all.

Happy New Year everybody! Are you ready for it? When I moved this blog to its new domain NavigateIntoSuccess.com I gave you a commitment I intend to observe: there will be a new post here every Monday and every Thursday. Today is Thursday, so let’s rock’n’roll.