Dynamics D365 Rapid Growth
Dynamics D365 projects have grown in quantity and scale quite dramatically in recent years, this has resulted in some rapid growth within the Microsoft Partner community with new entrants having varying degrees of ERP experience.
Resource Constraints
Rapid growth is often difficult to sustain without negative impact on resource availability and quality. Consultants need several implementations under their belt in our view before they start to become proficient in the art of delivering ERP.
Some of the larger partners with their accountancy backgrounds have a tendency to employ graduates, practical business experience is also in our view a plus for implementation consultants.
Is your Project Under Stress?
With the above demands on quality experienced implementation consultants we do encounter D365 Finance & Operations projects that are under stress and this is an area we are frequently called in to help with either supporting implementations or conducting reviews with recommendations.
If your project is suffering spiralling costs, high consultancy churn rates, lengthening delivery timelines and other indicators that suggest all is not well. A third party review using people that know what they are looking for and how to correct it becomes a prudent countermeasure in such circumstances.
Project Review & Assurance
A review is not necessarily all about producing a negative report on your supplier’s performance.
Issues could sit with either party and we recognise that the path to success is often one where you can restart and rebuild the relationship once the issues have been identified with a plan put in place to rectify them. Issue resolution is preferable to starting afresh with a new supplier and is usually the less costly.
Project Stages Assurance
Rather than waiting for potential issues to materialise some savvy users are assuring projects independently, taking the approach that preventative action is more cost effective in the long term than risking having to be reactive at a later stage.
Project assurance is typically conducted at key milestone stages, often an activity conducted between the MS Partner and Client it assess how well the previous stage went and whether the business is ready to enter the next stage.
However on large programmes or projects it’s sometimes advisable to conduct this with the presence of an independent experienced organisation.
With limited experience of business system change, clients can all too easy to be railroaded down a path of everything will come right in the next stage but large projects are like tankers at sea, they need huge turning circles with experienced eyes piloting the turn in a timely fashion.
You are after all putting your entire business into the hands of a primary supplier, which is a risky strategy when thought about logically.
Ask yourself the question as to how confident you would be of your supplier telling you that they were struggling to deliver within the planned timeline or that the issue is theirs with resource.
Axsoftware, with many years of successful ERP delivery experience (more than 20 years with Microsoft Dynamics), can help you set and manage assurance check points right from the outset and demonstrate a level of diligence that’s worthy of the investment you are making in your new business systems.
