This article is another example of applying good business sense to enterprise projects. Flexible techniques focusing on collaborative design and requirements, joint development, validating in near-real-time, and receiving timely feedback are all hallmark of efficiency and effectiveness which are central to good project management. But what I think is truly important here is that agile is now encouraging and perhaps forcing people to think more creatively and solve the age old problems associated with big bang implementations. Let’s see if the needle moves in the right direction on ERP implementations. The history of success is rather dismal but the future looks brighter when project managers find the best approach, whether waterfall or agile, to implement ERPs successfully.
Te Wu’s comments on the article titled How Agile techniques can improve enterprise software implementation by Chris Doig for CIO.
Enterprise software implementations like ERP are famous for being late and exceeding budget. This article looks at using Agile concepts to reduce implementation project risks.
Chris Doig for CIO writes: Selecting best-fit enterprise software is critical to maximizing ROI, but, of course, that is only part of the story. That software must still be properly implemented. For a real world perspective on this, I interviewed Dan Raven, a project management consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area who specializes in ERP implementations. To date, Dan has about 15 SAP implementations under his belt, written a book on implementing SAP, and has done two Kenandy implementations (Kenandy is a cloud ERP built on theSalesforce platform).
Dan started the conversation by describing the benefits of learning from mistakes he and others have made, and gave an example from an SAP APO implementation some years ago. The implementation consultants captured the rather challenging business requirements, designed the system and presented it to the client. Unfortunately, their design would not work for that client. The consultants noted the shortcomings of their design, went through the cycle a second time and had the same result. It had taken over two months to reach this point, and there still was no workable design. SNIP, the article continues @ CIO, click here to continue reading…..