How to use Agile Principles for 3 to 6 months long ERP enhancement projects

In the previous article, we discussed how to use agile development principles to maintain and enhance ERP ecosystems where time to market is 30 to 45 days. In this post let’s discuss how to use agile principles for projects that span over 3 to 6 months. These undertakings usually help better integrate ERP systems with other applications (Salesforce, MDM systems) or automate key business process (invoice and payment processing).


The Minimum Viable Product to enhance or automate ERP business process requires much more configuration, development, and testing with larger interdependent project teams. Proposed enhancement must work end to end; otherwise, it will be considered a failure.  However, as a project manager, you can orchestrate the project teams using agile principles.

1. Build your team using business processes: As a project manager, try to build a team by the business processes. For example, if you are implementing invoice entry and approval automation process with 3 software components viz. invoice-entry thru image capture and OCR, machine learning to improve OCR capabilities and routing invoice for approvals. Such a project would need a product owner, an infrastructure team to install software (unless it is a cloud deployment), a team of business analysts, product SMEs, and testers. In such projects, you can build 3 individual teams to collaborate and deliver the results.
   
   
2. Determine number of sprints and user-stories each sprint will accomplish: Now break-down your project into architectural-runway and sprints. Agree on what functionality will be delivered to users for testing at the end of each sprint. Help people understand and appreciate that the product is not fully functional but that at the end of each sprint users can better visualize the final product.
   
   
3. Daily Scrum Meetings: Make sure to hold daily scrum meetings across all teams. Help teams understand inter-dependencies. You may have to help teams visualize the big picture and understand how an individual and their team fits into it.
   
   
4. Manage R.A.I.D log: Manage your Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies by and across the teams. Make sure you over-communicate your assumptions and dependencies to avoid ending up in the below situation.
   
   
5. Deal with bad news early on: As the saying goes, bad news does not get better with time. Engage your stake-holders and try alternatives. You may still end-up delivering the minimum viable product and subsequently add bells and whistles through monthly release cycles.
   
   
6. Don’t undermine testing efforts: Complexities and current tool maturities may not support full ERP automated end-to-end functional, system integration, regression, and user acceptance testing. Try to automate what you can to reduce future testing cycles and cost. However, don’t be over-ambitious and reduce your testing scope.
   
Please share your thoughts and comments below.