March 2009: Sure Step, Agile and Dinosaurs

Another one’s down, so let me give it a quick glance over my shoulder before I move on: March 2009.

This was the best month ever for this blog: it has seen most posts from me, most visits from you, most subscribers to the feed, and I’ve covered a wide range of topics which I am not yet sure if it has got me or lost me more visitors.

At the very beginning of March, I held a presentation on Sure Step as a part of a partner academy in Ljubljana, Slovenia. This presentation has basically shaped the content of this blog for a better part of March. After the presentation, I’ve took a part in a discussion about Sure Step, project methodologies in general and their value.

This discussion has triggered my How you should learn from Sure Step post in which I tried to give some practical advice on building a Dynamics consultancy practice from scratch by relying on Sure Step. It certainly wasn’t the best post I ever wrote, and it haven’t seen much traffic, but I still believe it gives a few valid thoughts about why prescriptive methodologies are a good starting point and a foundation to build upon. If you missed it, here’s your chance to catch up: click here to do so.

But the best part of the Sure Step discussion after that presentation was the idea of agile that one of the guys in the audience brought up. Can we do ERP the agile way? I was (and probably still am to a decent extent) a believer in waterfall. It’s not always wrong, and it’s not always right, it’s just about choosing the right approach at the right time. But this question has really got me unprepared. Up to that moment, I’d always say agile is not the right approach for ERP, mostly from the grounds that agile is about software development, ERP is not.

But 130 kilometers of road trip from Ljubljana back to Zagreb switched me into thinking mode. By the time I got home I wasn’t so sure about my position on agile any more. That’s why I decided to extend that line of thinking into a series of seven blog posts about how to apply principles of agile on an ERP implementation. Some of it’s a mere theory, some of it I’ve seen work in practice, but what really excited me is that this series of post has been blogged about and commented. There haven’t been too many comments, but I’d say just enough. If you have missed the series, click here to read the first what-if type of post, then proceed here to read the introduction into the series, then read the rest from there.

When I was writing my book, I had to cut out a lot of content to make it fit into the page-count constraints imposed by the publisher. Some of that content made its way into two blog posts in March: History of Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Natural selection: death of dataports. I’ll skim through my notes to see if there is anything else worth posting, but I believe there won’t be much.

Then I wrote a post that has been queued for a long time: a short introduction into Liquidity, Cost Accounting and Kitting functionality. I’ve been aware of all three from the very moment they were introduced, but a training I delivered last month followed by a discussion with two prospect customers and a partner company reminded me just how unaware most people are about the existence of these interesting features. So I’ve posted it, and in measly two days it was up, it got forwarded around in mails, and got itself onto the very top of Most Popular (and into Top 10 most read posts in March). It seems that it landed exactly where I wanted it to land, and that it increased the awareness of these features in those countries that don’t sport it as standard NAV equipment.

Throughout the month, I’ve posted a dozen or so quick news-like posts (one has slipped into April by accident: the Windows 7 post) which aren’t worth mentioning here, but I believe these kinds of posts really fuel your interests and bring you here in flocks.

All in all, this was a great month for me. Was it as good for you? Did you get what you came here for? I hope so. Don’t be shy, let me know.

See you around in April!