Project Management
Any project’s success depends on clearly defined goals, solid strategies, skillful resources, and detailed action plans, executed on schedule within budget while proactively managing the risks through exhaustive communication with all stakeholders.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
The most critical element of an ERP project is the knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience of the project manager. An experienced ERP project manager fully understands both the business and the technology
ERP Project Management Challenges:
1 Project Size and Complexity
2) Avoiding customizations by:
a) micro-level complex configuration of the
software and also by
b) changing business processes to fit the new software
3 Unrealistic Deadlines
4 Staffing with Turnover
5 Risk Management
6 Scope Creep and Unexpected Gaps
7 Budgets and Costs
8 Interfaces with Other systems
9 Organizational Politics and Resistance To Change
Business Intelligence (BI)
Business intelligence transparently visualizes critical information and uncovers unique insights of enterprises operations.
Each BI project is unique in terms of business objectives and technical solutions.
Successful Business intelligence can deliver analysis to accelerate and grow your business rapidly:
1. Onboard Teams all Stakeholders
2. Sign-off Scope and Objectives
3. Sign-off KPIs for each function scope
4. Build a Diverse Team
5. Select the Software and Hardware
6. Develop Comprehensive Project Plan:
a. Identify relevant data sources and frequency from all systems
b. Manage Data Cleansing, Data Processing, and Data Analysis Processes
c. Implement PoC / Pilot
7. Implement the changes to meet the KPIs
8. Train Stakeholders
Custom Development
Custom software development is important because it helps meet unique requirements at a cost competitive with purchasing, maintaining and modifying commercial software.
A custom project would move through the familiar steps of requirements gathering, code construction, testing, and deployment and apply the same methodologies, like Agile, DevOps, or Rapid Application Development, as any other software project.
Efficiency: Custom software is purpose-built to support processes swiftly and productively for uniqueness and flexibility, without the forceful need to change established business processes.
Scalability: Custom software can grow as an organization or business grows and changes.
Lower integration costs: Custom software can be built to integrate with its intended environment very cost-effectively.
Independence: Organizations can avoid price increases for licensing and support — and getting maintaining packaged software upgrades if the vendor terminates a product.
Budgets/Procurement
IT budgeting and its approval is a cumbersome yearly process unless done in a structured way to reflect the business aligned and approved IT strategy.
The main categories for transparency and tracking the IT budgets are:
1. Business applications segregated by projects and services.
2. Infrastructure is also segregated by projects and services.
3. Charge back to users based upon relevant allocation keys (optional but recommended)
The current and expected future costs over the year should be derived by doing quick and informal market research with vendors, business partners, and relevant stakeholders.
After approval of the budget, the step is to consume it by timely execution which requires proactively preparing CAPEX requests of projects together with relevant supporting documents, this ensures securing funds early on and timely execution of purchasing cycle.
