Merit Matters Blog

In an ever-changing global marketplace, companies are looking for every opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and simultaneously grow revenue, profits, and customer loyalty. Meanwhile, new regulatory requirements, competitive pressures brought on by an increasingly connected global economy, and technologies that “level the playing field” for companies of all sizes are making it more difficult to stay ahead of the competition. However, keep in mind that every challenge also represents an opportunity to beat out the competition.

ERP software - once considered a necessary commodity in the IT infrastructure - is now viewed as a strategic asset for organizations that want to be able to quickly adapt to change and accelerate business performance. Responding quickly to business needs can be the key to gaining and keeping a competitive edge. But inflexible IT systems can get in the way. An ERP system that is flexible and easy to use can play a critical role in helping your business achieve the agility it requires to compete and succeed.

Having one flexible, comprehensive business management solution can help you increase efficiency and reach by bringing together dispersed employees and operations, even when they operate in different languages and countries. It can also enable companies to gather fundamental business information from multiple departments or subsidiaries and analyze productivity, profitability, margins, and trends to help decision-makers understand current operations and resolve problems earlier and more easily.

By integrating business information throughout your supply chain, you can improve the flow of information and gain the insight you need to streamline operations and take advantage of changing conditions. The ability to define and manage items in multiple dimensions and track materials and goods throughout the product life cycle enhances inventory control and enables you to meet the information demands of customers and regulatory bodies. By increasing the flow of information internally and with trading partners, you can improve customer service, improve supply chain coordination, and take advantage of changing market conditions.

Microsoft Dynamics AX can strengthen your position in the marketplace and provide the backbone of an agile, flexible system that helps your business grow, adapt quickly to change, and take advantage of new business opportunities. Simple to use, straightforward to implement, and quick to adapt, Microsoft Dynamics AX can be delivered in the way that works best for your organization—via the cloud or on-premises. You can add staff, enter different geographies, launch new products, and pursue additional lines of business with the assurance that your IT system is there to support and help drive your strategic initiatives.

Nenad Simeunovic, Vice President of Services for Merit Solutions, was recently featured in the PM Network's March 2013 issue discussing using Agile Project Management techniques for ERP implementations.

Here a short excerpt from the article, titled Big Delivery in Small Packages:

Eliminating Waste: Agile is based on lean processes that remove non-value-added activities such as downtime. As a result, agile components such as daily stand-up meetings can help project teams deliver ERP-related functionalities faster. "During the 15-minute meeting, each team member says, 'This is what I did yesterday, this is what I'm going to do today and these are the obstacles I need help with,'" says Nenad Simeunovic, vice president of services at global IT services company Merit Solutions, Wheaton, Illinois, USA. "If there's a challenge, we can address it on the spot and move on. As a result, there are fewer distractions, and progress is being made on a more consistent basis."

Agile's benefits are especially appealing in the current volatile economy. "The departments are reluctant to tackle large-scale projects as one big initiative with scope, time and resources locked. Instead, they are looking more to deliver functionalities in iterations, where flexibility is allowed - even expected - due to rapid changes happening in the marketplace and in the organization. We can longer guarantee that our planning for today will be applicable in nine months," says Mr. Simeunovic.

View the digital release of the magazine, PM Network - Governing Creativity: Marrying Project Management with Innovation. The Agile ERP Project Management article starts on Page 60.

For development teams following an Agile methodology (Scrum), working on a couple of projects and covering a wide set of technologies like ours, it’s fairly common to have a number of team projects for each project we are working on. However, there are a couple of drawbacks when using multiple team projects as described in Good Reasons to not create a new Team Project.

In order to enable managers to analyze and plan our engagement, we needed to find a way to export data from all team projects we are currently working on. Unfortunately, TFS doesn’t support this fairly reasonable request. TFS provides a great integration with Excel, which enables easy exporting, modifying the data and publishing it back to TFS. However, if the query contains work item data from multiple team projects, an error TF208015 is thrown and no data will be exported.

This is a known issue and it in the TFS backlog. Suggested workaround is to create separate workbooks bound to different team projects and then to aggregate the data from tables. This means that you will still need to do a refresh in multiple workbooks.

We managed to find a more elegant way of retrieving the needed data using TFS Power tools. This add-on contains Team Foundation Power Tool (tfpt.exe) – a command line tool that enables you to work with files and directories under version control, team projects, and work items queries.

So, what you need to do is to create a Query in Visual Studio Team Explorer that displays the data you need and then export the data using the following commands. These will generate the TSV(tab separated values) and XML file.

c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools>tfpt query /format:xml "Engineering Team\Team Queries\Team Sprint Backlog - All Projects" /collection:http://tfs:8080/tfs/tfs%20projects > d:\allprojects.xml

c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools>tfpt query /include:header,data "Engineering Team\My Queries\AllProducts" /collection:http://tfs:8080/tfs/tfs%20projects > d:\allprojects.txt

Data from this generated TSV (or XML) can easily be imported in Excel and analyzed further, to the great satisfaction of your managers.

Microsoft keeps an open channel and listens to new feature requests from the users, so if you would like to have this feature in a next version of the TFS, go to feature request, register and vote.

Recently, we completed a full cycle implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX while using many aspects of the agile methodology.

Overall, the project had over 20 team members located at more than 3 locations spread across different time zones, and here are some of our best practices:

• Daily meetings help - especially if the expectation is set properly on the purpose and structure. The remote team members can be part of it as long as they are minority.
• The end result has to be the focus - the end game has to be known and talked about during the planning and review meetings (at least).
• TFS is a great tool, and having trained folks who know how to get the most out of it helps with transparency and many other aspects of the project.
• Smaller project teams can have independent sprints. Such approach does carry higher risk and it takes extra knowledge and experience to assure the end game alligment.
• Celebrating smaller wins is a must and alligning them with the sprint end can be a natural fit.

An agile project management approach is not for each project, but certain aspects can and should be considered, especially when an experienced team of consultants is working with knowlegable, IT savvy end users.