by Vjekoslav Babic on August 25, 2010
If your Degree of Fit is just not there, or the balance between it and the budgetary estimate is not favorable, the risk that project will exceed the budget or not meet the requirements is high, but you might still decide to go on. In fact, most consultants often do, choosing to fight the odds. According to field reports, this approach often fails.
There are four things you can do to ensure the customer satisfaction while keeping the project in budget and still reducing the risks by increasing the degree of fit.
Let’s see what they are.
[click to continue reading…]
by Vjekoslav Babic on April 30, 2009
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 MSDynamicsWorld.com has decided to post this content on their website shows how important a standard methodology is for a successful implementation project.
This excerpt is only the first part of a series of two articles, and the next one is due to follow soon. I’ll make sure to let you know about it.
Anyway, the book so far has been received pretty well, we’ve got a lot of good feedback, and Amazon.com sales rank consistently shows the audience likes it a lot. Have you got yourself a copy already?
by Vjekoslav Babic on April 6, 2009
“Software projects are no different from other projects”.
This statement is being repeated over and over at project management courses and seminars, even endorsed in books.
It’s true that software (and ERP implementation, as a subset of software) projects have many traits in common with projects in other disciplines. But ignoring their specifics is almost as wrong as saying that software projects are completely different than other projects.
[click to continue reading…]
by Vjekoslav Babic on March 17, 2009
“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.
Twenty months is a heck of a long time. And value achieved after a twenty-month implementation is often far below expectations.
[click to continue reading…]
by Vjekoslav Babic on March 16, 2009
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.
Agile is an unpopular word in ERP world. We, the ERP people, love the glory and the thunder of The Waterfall. It has worked for us since forever, after all. Yes, we’ve all seen it fail every so often, but we’ve learned to learn from failure, and we know there is no better approach. Don’t we?
Frankly, I am not completely sure we do.
[click to continue reading…]
