Pirmin's Podcast : IT - ERP - Projects 33 years of experience - 99 thoughts, a weekly podcast

# 25 Be careful with standard messages popping up 
We all love to make sure that we did all correct. So often, we have the desire to have a reminder popping up asking us, “Are you sure that XXX is correct?” The intention is good, keeping the user awake and potentially reduce errors, but on the other hand, the more we have these questions and we answer them with “yes/click ok,” the less we look at them. So, they lose their meaning as we just click to continue!



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# 24 Don’t over guide
Typically “assistants” or user guided processes are needed in early phases of a project. Just like a step-by-step workflow, asking you questions, guiding you or offer pre-filled values. Most of these guided processes then include drop down lists to select something and then “click ok” go to next screen. In most cases, these assistants will have a lot of explanatory infor-mation. All this is good, if a process is either executed very few times or generally, the user is not trained. If they are rou-tine tasks, make sure the user does not need to click a drop down and search there; he will know what to enter.  This click and search slows him down. 
Especially when you have a kind of stable business structure, the daily worker will know much more by heart than you think. When they need to use an assistant to create a purchase order, they will go nuts, or go through 3 drop down menus and drill to the end. They know all the steps by heart and often they even have the vendor number and item-numbers in mind! If they can just type straight forward, they are more efficient. Searching in an endless drop down list by scrolling down takes ages! But it does help untrained users.




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# 23 Digital s**t does not smell… That’s all
What is the difference between analog s**t and digital s**t? The analog one sticks at your shoes and smells... on the other hand, the digital one sticks on you but doesn’t smell. If you don’t do your homework and check what goes wrong in your old way of working and seek to understand why it’s going wrong, you will just implement the old/analog way. This ap-proach is not going to solve your problem. Generations of ERPs have been implemented to improve the accuracy of the stock and failed. If you continue to allow a random buying or an uncontrolled stock taking, know this: the quality will not improve with an ERP.



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# 22 Don‘t make all your processes bullet proof
Don’t try to make all your processes and exceptions bullet-proof. This will only increase the complexity of the implemen-tation and complexity is the enemy of stability, budget and success. Make your few core processes tank-cannon proof! If your employees can rely that a defined standard process is working stable and predictable, they can handle the exceptions. If you also try to make your exception process bulletproof, be sure to have the resources as you will never achieve. I saw once a sticker: We are engineers and make things foolproof. Each time we achieve some improved fool appears.


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# 21  Don’t try to reach everything in one run
When you start your project, the ambitions and motivation to change and go for the best are high. Even if aiming for the stars is needed to achieve best results, you need to be realistic enough to focus on what is needed. You will not reach any perfect result in one shot! Create something that is working. Give the team a success. Start with a minimum viable prod-uct/project. This makes failure less likely. Be sure some people will be disappointed about the “minimum”, but with the next iteration of the project/next wave you can do better and im-prove. Better 3 small steps and be each time successful than one big jump and fail.



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# 20 Don’t change / widen your scope

Even though you should be open to increase the functionality, integration or usability of a solution, don’t change the scope once the project is started! Everybody tends to change or in-crease the project scope during the implementation phase as we all are learning and seeing that what we originally defined is not sufficient. Changing / adjusting the scope should only be done if there is an immediate and massive business value in-crease which over rules the risk of a project failure/delay.


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# 19  Aim for the stars
As your business vision is a vision and may never be achieved, your project vision must be open and wide. Don’t exclude ideas or solutions at the beginning. Think about all the integra-tion possibilities or features that would be great to use. As long as you stay realistic and know that aiming for the stars may result in landing on the moon, all is good. If you block yourself too early, you may even not reach a lift off.


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#18Coca Cola is not Pepsi 
One difficult thing for people is to imagine similarity or mak-ing abstractions. A Cola beverage is mainly water, sugar (or substitute), color, flavor, CO2. (Some details missing  ... don’t hate me for that). If you now discuss at Pepsi a software im-plementation where you use the (perfect) slides you made for a Coca Cola project, the audience will in 90 % of the cases complain that „We are not Coca Cola and all is different“. They can’t abstract that making a Cola beverage is for nearly all Cola recipes the same… Just a different brand. If you want to get the buy-in from your team, especially if key users are involved, get as soon as possible reasonable test data, which reflect your company. Otherwise you will fight that users don’t understand the test case. (Comment form the author (me): if someone from a Cola beverage company is reading this and does not agree, please invite me for a call and tell me where I‘m wrong, happy to learn the differences.)


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# 17 A partner is a partner 
If you choose to implement a larger software project, you should consider the role of external persons / your implementa-tion partner. Complex software implementations need a deep understanding in your business and a deep trust from you in your partners. You should consider your implementation part-ner as partner not as a vendor/contractor! Same applies for other involved persons like freelancers, developers, sub-contractors. If you integrate them in your team structure and have a work relation like a partnership, things will go easier when troubles arise. Like everywhere finding the „right“ part-ner is a hard task. It is not sure that you will find the perfect one, but changing your partner when the slightest troubles arise will not help for stability and success.


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#16 Stay with your methods
Once you start implementing a major software solution you will choose an implementation method, agile, scrum, waterfall, a special method from your partner, data first, logic first or what else is on the market and you think suits your business case best. All of these methods have shown that they work, at least for the business case they were developed.  Make sure you have a suitable method and approach for your project. You should avoid mixing methods because it sounds more logi-cal/easier using step 1, 2 from method A and 3, 4 from method B and then back to method A. In most cases this will not work because of the fact that methods are a closed universe.  Open-ing it and mixing will create most likely issues. Don‘t try to be more intelligent than the inventor / creator of a method which was successfully used before


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