Typical Topics to Consider When Planning and Implementing Dynamics NAV Roll-out to Russia

When planning a roll-out of your customized corporate solution to Russia, you will need to consider many factors, related both to general nature of roll-outs as well as specifics of certain country. I've blogged about various particular topics. Here you would find a summary on typical project management mistakes when planning and performing an implementation of Dynamics NAV in Russia as a roll-out of your corporate solution.

Nature of Russian accounting: If you plan to implement Financials for Russia, please consider that the Russian accounting principles, being similar to IFRS or GAAP, anyway have quite a lot of differences and require special attention. Underestimation of that factor is critical for successful projects.

Psychology of Russian users: You simply would not imagine how difficult it is sometimes to put the users to the system you are implementing. European users have their issues as well :-), but Russian users won the "most innovative approach of how to break the process and deceive the system" award. I could tell many stories on that on a separate blog. But, just remember - if the instruction can be misinterpreted, it certainly will be misinterpreted in its most perverted way. Consider this when designing the processes or writing protocols or user manuals.

Accounting traditions and habits: Most accountants get stick to Most popular Russian accounting software, called "1C" . Thus, it is very challenging task to transfer their thinking and put them comfortably working with a traditional ERP, where you can't modify posted documents and where you have a lot more restrictions and limitations.

Peculiarities of Russian localization: As I wrote some time earlier, NAV localized version in Russia, officially supported by Microsoft, is one of the largest in the world, compared to Brazil and India. Thus many partners that had performed roll-outs in Europe for few European countries might underestimate the complexity of the merge and the real quantity of objects for Russian roll-out. Please consider huge quantity of added and modified objects. Also, many of those are REALLY needed in case you would like to use Financials in Russia, and it is due to the nature of Russian legislation. So, just "copy-paste" the typical European settings would not suite. Better select a correct local Russian partner and develop an implementation project plan together. Refer more here: Russian NAV localization: dive into details.

Licensing issues: Russian localization is covered by Microsoft Russian country code licenses. I would suppose you most likely already working with your own corporate pool of licenses, but they would not work by default with Russian localization. Think in advance how you would address this issue, and refer to License Policy Advices.

General Business Risks: When designing the project scope, management and business owners in Russia tend to be very conservative on automation of basic manual processes. In many cases they think "I'd rather hire additional cheap employee who would permanently generate the reports in Excel manually, rather than spend budget for implementation of automated reporting; return on investment for next 5 years is very difficult to calculate, and I do not know what would happen with my business next year". Thus results in the fact that the budgets for correct implementations are excessively limited, and end users finally suffer of enormous manual work, that leads to errors and finally none is happy about the project.

Commitment of stakeholders: This problem might not be typical only for Russia, but for Russia it is quite essential. Project sponsors and other stakeholders usually (unfortunately) lack project management skills, which results in several project risks and finally errors:

•  When agreeing the project, they think quite long over the budget and implementation scope; when finally they agree, they are usually not eager to move the deadlines, so you might find yourself in a situation when the full scope has been agreed, but you have twice less time to implement that. Address and insist that all the prolongations in decision-making affect automatically the potential deadline and increase project risks if it is not moved accordingly.
• Key experts lack commitment to participate in the project. "Ok, here is you money, see you next half year with ready database". It is inevitable to insist that the budget for the project is not only the money client is paying, but also the time his key experts spend in the project. This should be clearly explained in advance and even put to contractual obligations.

All these topics are essential to consider. I'd seen many failed projects due to lack of planning or underestimations of Russian specifics. The fact that you had implemented your corporate NAV in 10 countries already does not automatically mean it would be easy way for Russia. Please consider a local partner for assistance in many of the aspects, pointed above.T