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. 

Importance of R.A.I.D. Log

 

Every project or a program in its life cycle will experience series of Risks, project team will have to make certain Assumptions, act on Issues and make critical decisions to remove Dependencies. It is very critical for the project manager to track these events and articulate it back to project stake-holders. Also at the end of the project it will be critical to review the RAID log, to document true lessons learnt.

Let’s understand each of these terms in context of a project.

• Risks can be defined as a potential of losing something of value as a result of an action / inaction, foreseen / unforeseen. As a project or a portfolio manager you have to help your team identify risk freely, help evaluate severity and put in place plans to mitigate the risk.

• Assumptions: In any project due to time and resource constraints project teams have to make certain assumptions to keep moving forward. If these assumptions at later date are proved to be wrong, it will require changes which may impact project cost and timeline. It is important to track these assumptions and keep stakeholders aware of critical assumptions being made.

• Issues: an event with a potential to disrupt desired outcome. Issues can be related to business processes, current designs, product limitations, or resources. It will require an action from the team to resolve the issues facing the project. Addressing the issues at hand will require project team to make certain design or business process decisions, assume risk or make assumptions. Issues and resolutions need to be tracked as it has impact on the outcome of the project.

• Dependencies: The direct or indirect reliance of one Process or Activity upon another which is currently impacting or slowing down project progress. It is critical to track dependencies and bring it to the attention of right stakeholders so a decision can be made and dependency removed.

Tracking RAID

Depending on the sophistication of a project methodology, several tools may be available for a project manager to track RIAD. On many of my projects I have used a simple Excel spreadsheet or a SharePoint List to help me in my day to day role.