Design

10 reasons that make design absolutely necessary

by Vjekoslav Babic on September 14, 2010

Unfinished buildings, by net_efekt (on Flickr)Design is one of a kind. Other phases in Sure Step are understood and accepted as good and necessary. But design, do we really do that? Is it really necessary? Who’s going to pay for it? Does the customer really need all those documents? Instead of writing documents, you could have it developed in the same, or less time. And so on and so forth.

As a matter of fact, if you asked me to pick one single most important phase in a Sure Step project, then it’s the design. No second thoughts here, whatsoever.

Here I list the ten most important reasons that I believe make design absolutely indispensable.

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Setup-dependent requirements

by Vjekoslav Babic on September 9, 2010

While designing a custom functionality for a customer, there was an issue with posting groups: the way the custom functionality was designed would result in value entries being always posted to a single posting group, resulting in inventory balances always going to the same inventory account.

When I brought this issue to my customer’s attention, they said: “but we only have one single inventory account, and we only use one single posting group, so we don’t need this functionality to be smart about this”.

This was an example of what I like to call setup-dependent requirements.

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A new book about Microsoft Dynamics NAV

by Vjekoslav Babic on June 1, 2010

Back in my time (now I feel old :) ) if you wanted to read a book about Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you just couldn’t—there wasn’t any available. Today, if you want to learn about NAV, not only there are books about programming and implementing, but with new Mark Brummel’s book you can now learn about the most important aspect of Microsoft Dynamics NAV customization projects—the application design. The book hasn’t yet been published, but is already available for preorder through PACKT Publishing at the following link: Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Application Design.

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What does a Dynamics consultant do: Part two

by Vjekoslav Babic on December 4, 2008

image Yesterday, in my What does a Microsoft Dynamics consultant do? post I started explaining the job of an application consultant. As promised, today I’ll explain what duties an application consultant has in each of Sure Step phases.

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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 deliverable of the Analysis phase and it both documented customer’s requirements and explained how they will be met with Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution.

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Read My Lips: Why?

September 24, 2008

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 [...]

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Diagnostic Phase – a signpost for implementation

September 19, 2008

Each phase of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology is equally important in an implementation project. You could argue that analysis is the most important, or that design is the most important, or that operation is less important. I’ll paraphrase Scott Adams here and ask: how one phase can be more important if each of them [...]

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Architectures: Good, Bad and Ugly

June 11, 2008

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. Most of the [...]

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Standard enemy

May 15, 2008

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. All these gizmos can turn [...]

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Not-so-elementary costing: The Change

April 11, 2008

They say the only constant is change. I’d say that the only other constant is error. We humans tend to err. Give a repeatable task to a human, and they’ll mess it up every once in a while. Some call it the human factor. One of the many repeatable tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is setting [...]

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