Did you have a chance to attend the NAV Decisions 2009 virtual conference? If yes, how did you like the event? To me, this was a great experience. It wasn’t the first virtual conference I was a part of, but it most certainly was the best.

But if you didn’t have a chance or time to be there (virtually), you don’t have to worry. Even though the conference is over, the website and all the content will be available for three more months. So, until midnight of January 15, 2010, you can still visit the conference website, register and watch and listen to any of the presentations delivered.

Of course, after-the-event attendance does not feel nearly as great as on-line live attendance, simply because during the event you had a chance to ask questions, participate in chats and interact with exhibitors, moderators, speakers or other attendees. But at least you have a chance to see the presentations.

My presentation titled “Sure Step Methodology in Agile Environment: Delivering More ERP Value in Less Time” was one of the four general sessions, and it discussed the topic I introduced on this blog half a year ago.

When I started writing about this topic I didn’t expect it to get half the attention or heat it did, and I am really proud that it became a sort of a trend-setting topic here. It was repeated time after time on other Dynamics or ERP blogs, it caught the attention of people at MSDynamicsWorld.com who wanted it a part of their NAV Decisions 2009 conference.

There were slight technical issues that made the presentation a bit longer than expected and Q&A session a little shorter, but there was no shortage of quality questions, and some of them were really intriguing.

I’m sorry I didn’t have time to answer all the questions, but if you were there, and asked a question which I didn’t answer, just get in touch with me through this blog and let’s discuss. That’s the beauty of virtual events, because they are all on-line, even when they are over, they’re not quite so.

On October 14th you should not miss the NAV Decisions 2009 virtual conference organized by MSDynamicsWorld.com, the independent authority for news and views on Microsoft Dynamics.

NAV Decisions 2009 is a virtual conference & tradeshow for Microsoft Dynamics NAV Professionals seeking implementation strategies, thought leadership, and best practices for maximizing the value and effectiveness of their organization’s NAV platform and initiatives.

The best news about the conference is: it’s absolutely free.

I am one of the featured speakers at the conference, and my session titled “Sure Step Methodology in Agile Environment: Delivering More ERP Value in Less Time” will focus on an ever-hot topic of generating value through ERP.

NAV Decisions is an independent conference organized by MSDynamicsWorld.com. This live online venue is free to attendees and supported by our sponsors. We build this event upon our leading online news and product information resources to provide a conference experience that brings attendees the latest thinking and perspective from the world of Dynamics NAV.

NAV Decisions 2009 is simply the most informative and effective way to hear from the strategic and thought leaders in the Dynamics NAV community. We bring together senior management from Microsoft, the VAR community, and independent experts to discuss the topics that matter to the organizations using Dynamics NAV.

Attending the conference will let you:

• Get up to speed on the latest trends, technologies and strategies for Dynamics NAV

• Listen to real-world customer success stories

• Discover the secrets to establishing priorities and gaining commitment across the organization for your NAV strategy

• Explore which NAV tools will bring you the most success

• Learn how to navigate your way through a successful NAV upgrade

• Drive greater efficiency and productivity from your dynamics system during tough times.

My session will focus primarily on Sure Step, a topic I’ve covered here many times. Microsoft has developed the Sure Step and promoted it among partners as a standard implementation methodology. It is focused on delivering clear value to the customers, but in its core it’s a ‘waterfall’ methodology. ERP investments on average reach the break-even point only after 30 months, while in the times of economic turmoil customers are looking for faster ROI. This presentation explores the benefits and risks of the waterfall and agile approaches, and how Sure Step can be put to work in a more agile environment to deliver more value in considerably shorter implementation time frames.

To learn more about the conference and to register, follow this link.

While at Microsoft, I had a chance to work on some very exciting projects, I was sitting at the source of information, and the thrill of being able to know about all the news and developments before anyone else is priceless.

But the thrill of being able to work on my own, to pick my own projects, to take on completely new challenges, was even more priceless.

Microsoft is a great place to work, and I really enjoyed it there, but there was something odd about it. Microsoft’s logo on my business card surely opened many doors and brought some weight to all I did, but I was never sure: what part of my e-mail address did my customers really trust: the vjekoslav.babic part or the @microsoft.com part? In other words, did my customers trust me because I was Microsoft, or did they trust me for what I said and did.

I’ve decided it was just about time to find out.

So, in scope of my independent consulting career, what am I going to do?

Primarily, I am going to work with NAV customers, companies that are implementing the solution, but have no internal expertise in NAV or in ERP in general, nor they fully understand the implementation process. My value proposition to those companies is simple: I help you define clear project scope that brings you value and returns your investment, I help you stay focused on value, and I keep your project on track, on budget, and on time by ensuring project, methodology, implementation and NAV best practices.

With 33% of the ERP customers stating that their biggest challenge was lack of ERP experience, 68% of implementations taking much longer than planned, 65% of ERP implementations going over budget, and 42% of customers not being satisfied with the implementation results, I see a lot of market for my services.

Secondarily, I am going to target NAV partners, and I will offer project methodology, ERP best practices and NAV product coaching services, as well as project management, quality assurance and NAV solution design and architecture services on their projects. For partners, I am also going to deliver pre-sales services and help them sell value of NAV.

So, there is a lot of challenge awaiting me on my independent consulting path. Who knows, maybe we meet somewhere along it and I’m looking forward to that opportunity.

The book is targeted primarily at business and management students and managers running ERP projects, and explains what ERP business processes are about, rather than focusing on technical issues or specific products.

This book gives an introduction in ERP and Business Management, that focuses on ERP and business processes, rather than on the buttons, is very needed for students of all kinds of business educations and also for managers who want to understand the meaning of ERP for their company.

• The book focuses on business processes, rather than addressing the buttons you must use in the ERP-software. To keep it practical, all illustrations and examples are dedicated to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. It’s not a manual, nor a training in using parts of Dynamics NAV 2009.
• The book has been written from starting level on this subject, it’s an introductory book.
• It will not cover any software, but uses Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 throughout the book as illustrating ERP system.
• The book discusses the business processes a company has to use in order to run the SMB company professionally.

If you are unsure whether the book is for you, you can download a sample chapter and check it for yourself. From what I know about the author, and from what I’ve read in the sample chapter, I can only recommend it.

Click here (or here) to learn more about the book. At least make a look!

So far, Sure Step has only been available to partners enrolled in a service plan, which was a big obstacle to smaller or new partner companies who saw investment in a service plan as a significant expenditure.

Here’s a part of the message of Doug Kennedy’s speech:

“One of the key benefits of the new, improved partner programs that we would like to announce today is the availability of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step to all our Dynamics partners!  Customer engagement methodologies like Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step enable you to close the solution sale, implement dynamics solutions in a predictable, reliable manner and help manage a customer relationship for life.  Considering we are raising the bar for our partners, we only feel that it is fair to provide you the best practices and tools to reach that bar. 

This is the first investment of many that you will see as part of our partner program.  Now it is up to you to take advantage of this resource, and drive your productivity, improve collaboration and ensure customer delight with you and the Dynamics experience.  Today we already have more than 42% of our partners using Sure Step actively on pre-sales and implementations. 

With the introduction of certifications later this year, and the availability of Sure Step to all, we would like to ensure that you have the competitive advantage out there against our competition; and we remain equal partners in your investments.”

This is really a great news, especially in smaller countries and markets, where small partners didn’t have opportunity to access Sure Step, yet they had to compe with fierce competition who used Sure Step every day. With Sure Step being available to all partners, every Dynamics partner will be able to achieve the same level of sales and implementation methodology experience and skills.

You can access Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step by clicking here.

So, I welcome you all back to my blog, and I hope to keep it up for you. I can’t promise I’ll get back to my previous twice-per-week schedule, but I’ll do my best not to lose the enthusiasm once again. See you around!

When implementing NAV in manufacturing companies, I’ve sometimes heard complaints that the type of manufacturing supported in NAV doesn’t fit the customer needs.

And sometimes that’s completely true. NAV supports discreet manufacturing, and it handles it pretty well. But the things do get bumpy when you venture into process manufacturing world.

Sometimes customers or even consultants don’t really understand why this happens. It’s simple: there is a big difference between process and discreet manufacturing, and to successfully implement NAV in these two fundamentally different environments you need to understand and appreciate these differences.

The biggest difference between these two distinct manufacturing universes is that results of discreet manufacturing can be easily reversed, while with process manufacturing there is no way to do it.

With discreet manufacturing you manufacture countable stuff that can (mostly) be disassembled into the parts it’s made of. A car, for example, is produced in pieces, and if you fancy, you can disassemble it and put it back on shelves as components that can be used to build another car tomorrow.

With process manufacturing you typically manufacture uncountable stuff that cannot possibly be disassembled back into components. You can’t unscramble scrambled eggs.

With discreet manufacturing we talk about bills of materials; in process manufacturing we have recipes. In discreet manufacturing we have operations that put the stuff together; in process manufacturing we have processes that change physical, chemical or mechanical properties of components.

I’ve worked on several projects in both discreet and process industries, and I’ll definitely dedicate one of my future posts to process manufacturing challenges with NAV implementations, and how to overcome them.

I started this year rather ambitiously: with a commitment to blog twice a week. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find out I haven’t been quite committed to that in the past two weeks. As a matter of fact, for the time being I’ll have to take it a little bit more easy. My work schedule has stopped being my friend a while ago, and I decided I’d put my private life before this blog. I hope you don’t mind.

I won’t stop blogging, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t stop coming back from time to time to check out what’s new. It’s just that I’ll have to rollback my commitment from the beginning of this year, and fallback to my previous irregular blogging schedule. Work and private life permitting, there will be something useful here, probably twice a month, possibly more, and I’m really glad you are now tapping my shoulder saying: “don’t worry pal, I understand!”

See you around, let’s navigate together into another two years of this blog.

How does this sound to you?

To me, this sounds pretty bad, because there is an important distinction between adjusting the budget based on change requests and consuming the contingency reserve.

Let’s start with the project budget. After most planning activities have been completed, after all project activities have been defined and estimated, and after the resources have been assigned to the activities, you create the project budget.

After you define the budget, you create the cost baseline. Cost baseline is the approved plan for project costs at any given point in time, and it reflects the how much the project is expected to cost at that specific point.

Baseline is useful when determining the success of a project, because any difference between the actual costs and cost baseline tell you how much above or below budget your project went.

However, budget is not the Holy Scripture. Once it has been defined, it can easily change.

Let’s take a look at house building project, it’s easy to imagine. You approve the plans, define activities and resources, and establish the budget at $200,000. Then half way into the project your customer changes their mind about  the house and decides to have two additional balconies. A typical example of a change request. You change the plans, and adjust the project budget by additional $40,000.

This is an example of re-baselining. After you get a change request which affects the project budget, you need to establish a new baseline. Imagine that after approving the change request for two balconies you didn’t adjust the budget by the additional $40K. Your house would cost $240,000 and your estimated costs were $200,000. Your customer can easily complain that you trampled over the budget. If you did the rebaselining after accepting the change request, your new budget is $240,000 and if that’s how your house ends up costing your customer, you have done it within the budget.

But, when your windows are ready to be installed, the truck delivering them crashes in an accident, destroying all the windows. You order another shipment, causing you extra $15,000 in costs. Since your customer didn’t “order” the windows to be broken in the accident, they can’t be expected to bear any extra costs related to that accident. In the end, your house ends up costing $215,000 instead of $200,000. If you didn’t have a contingency reserve – this extra money comes out of your pocket.

Contingency reserve is used to cover for known unknowns. You know that something might go wrong, but you don’t know what and when, and you want to be prepared for these events. These events might cause you time delays or budget overruns, so you need to include them into the baseline in order to be able to cope with them if (or better yet, when) they occur. If they happen, they don’t justify a change in budget, because they don’t change the scope; they are just events which interfere with the project execution, causing you unplanned trouble.

Change requests are different. They change the scope, so they have to change the budget. If you just say at the beginning of your project that you are going to address the changes as they occur – of course you are! How else would you handle them? But still, handling change has nothing to do with having contingency – you still need it, or else you’ll face serious trouble when the unknown occurs, and you know it will occur, don’t you?

Blogs are a great thing. They allow people to share their own knowledge, experience, thoughts, ideas. But communities are the real thing, they allow many people do the same at once, expanding the sharing into exchanging knowledge, experience, thoughts, ideas, advice, you name it.

One of the best IT communities out there is IT Knowledge Exchange. In their own words, “IT Knowledge Exchange was created to allow IT pros to ask questions, get answers, collaborate and exchange knowledge with their peers. Whether you are looking for an answer to an IT problem that has got you stuck or feel like helping your peers by answering their questions, IT Knowledge Exchange allows you to easily find the answer you are looking for.”

No matter which technology is your favorite, you are going to find a lot of interesting stuff on that site and I am strongly encouraging you to go and check it out.

I am also very proud to announce that NavigateIntoSuccess.com is now starting a partnership with IT Knowledge Exchange and joining a long family of IT blogs featured on their website.

April. There is definitely something upside down with this month. I’ve started it with a somewhat ambitious decision to blog a post a day. And it worked. Kind of. For the first eight days, anyway.

And then it happened. Suddenly I’ve found myself blogging only occasionally, practically chasing my promise to deliver a blog post twice a week. And boy did it feel like delivery, every single time. At first I thought it was about me, but it seems it wasn’t. All of NAV blogosphere was dormant in April.

Probably the most important event in April 2009 for Microsoft Dynamics NAV in EMEA region was Directions EMEA 2009. I didn’t attend it so I didn’t blog about it, but many other bloggers did. Practically half the NAV blogs’ content in April was directly or indirectly related to this conference or its sessions.

Let me start with Bugsy’s Blog, the newest arrival to NAV blogosphere, which debuted this month by giving a two part walkthrough of SharePoint integration with NAV 2009 through Web Services. This double post is based on a Directions session and shows with a pretty nice example how simple it is to expose your NAV business logic through a familiar web-based interface. Please, be so kind to read Part 1 and Part 2, which won’t only be worth your time, but there is no better way to wish a blogger a warm welcome than by visiting their blog.

Another blog, that of Mark Brummel, did a big comeback in April, delivering seven useful technical articles explaining some intrinsics of NAV on SQL Server. I believe all the posts are worth your attention, and listing all seven doesn’t make much sense, so I simply give you the link to his April archive – go check it, and find out if there is something for you there.

In April, Microsoft has published the Performance Guide for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 which is available to partners through PartnerSource. It has grabbed attention of several bloggers, including my friend Dave’s Gaspode’s Brain Dump, Stefan’s Dynamics NAV Blog and Microsoft Dynamics UK Blog, although it’s nowhere close to the Hardware Sizing guide we are all so used to. Dave’s blog post about this document is totally aligned with what I think of it, and gives a nice insight into what this document lacks and what is good about it.

Plataan posted a true gem about how to leverage fields grouping functionality of page objects in NAV 2009 here. It’s so good that I envy those guys a little bit that I didn’t come up with that idea when I was writing my book.

Finally, I conclude with Waldo’s blog which never disappoints. This month, it brought a nice article about form transformation tool, a piece of software I personally very much dislike, but blog posts like this make me slowly change my opinion. In well-known Waldo’s style, it’s useful, full of cross-references and links and is an excellent starting point if you want to get familiar or learn about this somewhat user-unfriendly, but extremely useful tool. Check it out here.

That’s not all folks. There have been other posts on other blogs out there, not too many of them though, mostly building upon their previous articles or giving you updates to their existing tools, examples or demos. All in all, there have been better months in NAV blogosphere than April 2009, so let’s hope May changes all this. Enjoy it!

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?

If projects were completely predictable, there would be no need for risk management. Everything could be planned and executed according to plan. However, we know better. Unexpected things happen, disrupt the original plans and cause time and cost overruns. In IT projects, these overruns are far too common to be ignored.

How do you handle unexpected events which cause your schedule to extend or your project to cost more? If you hope to address such events as they happen, you must expect to either spend unallocated funds, or to give up on quality. Neither choice is too good: spending unplanned funds is frowned upon by project sponsors, and sacrificing quality to mitigate unexpected overruns is always bad.

To address situations such as these, you need to allocate special funds called contingency reserve.

Contingency reserve are funds allocated above the project budget, which are intended to be used when unexpected events occur, to reduce the risks of cost overruns. It cannot account for everything unexpected in a way to cover any unexpected costs, but a properly created contingency reserve should be able to help a project go smoothly even when costs go over budget.

One way to define a good contingency reserve is through risk management processes. First, you need to identify the risks which can result in cost overruns. Then you need to qualify the risks to identify the most critical ones, or those worth focusing on. Finally, you need to quantify those risks and express them in terms of financial impact on project budget and probability of their occurrence. The product of impact and probability is a monetary value called exposure.

Exposure isn’t the amount of money that the realized risk event is going to cost you if it occurs. If the risk event occurs, it should cost you the amount of money you determined to be the impact of the risk. However, if you have twenty possible risks, each having its specific impact and probability, the total sum of exposure of all those risks should suffice to cover for any risks that are realized. Statistically, not all risks are going to happen, but some of them most likely will. Probability that all risk events are going to happen is statistically equal to the product of all probabilities, making it extremely unlikely that all of them will happen.

To define a good contingency, you simply sum all exposures: the result is amount of funds you need to set aside to be used whenever something unplanned or unexpected happens. Since contingency is sum of exposures, and probability of all risks occurring is the product of all risk probabilities, statistically a contingency reserve defined in this way should do for majority of projects.

Let’s see how projects work with and without contingency.

Imagine you had $100K budget to build a house. A delivery trucks has an accident, losing you $10K in building material.

Without contingency, you don’t have extra $10K to finance this loss, and the only way to get the loss compensated and get project on track is to reduce the quality by cutting costs somewhere else on the project, such as choosing lower quality materials, or using less material than required or something of the sort.

With contingency, you have extra funds available to you specifically for such occasions. So, you simply tap into contingency reserve funds, and finance those extra $10K, get the needed materials and stay on track. Quality stays unaffected, because you don’t need to compensate for anything, and you don’t need to cut costs anywhere.

Contingency is necessary on any project which is likely to exceed its allocated budget, and IT projects are very likely to do so. With such reserves you can execute your projects smoothly, without panic when (not if, when) risk events occur and cause budget overruns.

In my next post I’ll explain the difference between contingency consumption and budget re-baselining, which I’ve seen confused many times in practice by both customers, and consultants.

Also, I hope you enjoyed the presentation, and learned a lot about this, for Croatian market, still upcoming release. For me, preparing (and delivering) this presentation was a challenge, regardless of all the effort I invested into researching the product last year.

If you didn’t have a chance to attend the presentation, and you are still interested in watching the presentation, I invite you to visit the presentation workspace at http://www.mswindays.com/WinDays9Technology/radniprostori/472/default.aspx.

Please note – only WinDays9 registered attendees can access this web page (as far as I know).

According to their website, if you are “in the early stages of selecting a new ERP software or if you’ve already completed your project, our ERP Quick Diagnostic will help you benchmark with other ERP projects across the globe”.

On the other hand, if you are thinking about starting an ERP project, you can take advantage of the ERP Readiness Assessment which can “determine how ready you really are for ERP”.

All in all, two simple online tools which can help you understand how well your ERP project is going or completed, or what can you expect if you decide to venture into one. Click here to check this out.