Comments on: 5 steps to implement ERP the Agile way

By: Tarek Demiati

Tarek Demiati — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:46:12 +0000

Ship Early & Often is definetly the way to go.

Working software over documentations (docs are required only when they really tell the reality)

I’m a certified Scrum Master and I really love the total paradigm shift from the rotten waterfall model that has served us for way too long

By: Vjekoslav Babic

Vjekoslav Babic — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:53:07 +0000

@Dave: A lot of customers fear the idea of running the old system in paralle, but intentionally or not, this happens often at least for a little while. If for nothing, then just to make sure everything works okay, or to be able to fall back should something go seriously wrong in the new one. But in any case, what is the strongest reason why the new and the old system shouldn’t run in parallel? It might be the infrastructure costs, if the old and the new softwares don’t use the same infrastructure (old one being on Banyan VINES, the new one being on TCP/IP) – that might be valid. If both systems can run on the same infrastructure, then the issue is just made smaller – if you need to have two servers instead of only one, then do; the costs of having an additional server (plus costs of integration) are often much lower than the costs of risky customization. The strongest reason are probably the licensing costs, for example if after go-live of the new system you don’t want to extend the licenses of the old one for another year because it is too expensive. This is really the strongest reason, because licensing is many times more expensive than a new server. But in general, I believe that there are not too many valid reasons why running both systems in parallel for a little while should be avoided at all costs. Nice to see you back, Dave! I hope you enjoyed the holidays, and I do envy you, a little

By: Dave Roys

Dave Roys — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:44:30 +0000

I like the idea of implementing a vanilla NAV before gradually implementing extra features in an agile manner. However, from my experience, a number of the modifications are critical for the system to work – we are not talking about user preference things where the users want a simpler way of doing things, but instead things like interfaces which will mean that without the modifications, we need to continue to run the old system in parallel. Maybe we should say that our first round of requirements gathering gives us the Must Have requirements and we implement Vanilla+Must Have features. Then we can gradually introduce value add features. I realise this is an older post but I’ve just come back from my holidays.

By: Vjekoslav Babic

Vjekoslav Babic — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:21:34 +0000

Rashed: I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one believing in agile ERP However, merely showing the application to the users does not mean you are doing an agile implementation. Key-user training was a part of Analysis phase in first version of Sure Step, now it is part of Design phase (too late for an agile approach, IMHO), but still this is merely installing the vanilla solution for them to play, it doesn’t put the vanilla solution into production. I understand that I might be advocating pure heresy by calling for vanilla NAV implementation (because we advertise it as a highly customizable solution after all), but the closer to standard you go live with, the more chances of success you get. I elaborate on this in my next post, scheduled for tomorrow morning.
Thanks for commenting, Rashed, and nice to see you here again!

By: Rashed

Rashed — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:52:30 +0000

For large projects: more than 500 hours, agile implementation is the only way to succeeded.
On most projects, customer do not know the requirement, or don’t know what they want, so by showing them a glimpse of what the final product will look like, (mostly basic tables and forms where they enter/view data), they quickly understand what they do, or don’t want.

By: Navigate Into Success

Navigate Into Success — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:38:41 +0000

5 steps to implement ERP the Agile way…

In my previous post I%u2019ve (what, again?) shared some statistics about success and failure rates of software…