Elevating Finance: Unleashing Emerging Tech for Intelligent ERP Transformation

As technology advances, staying competitive requires continuous process evolution. For SAP Finance leaders & architects, it is imperative that integrating emerging technology into key areas is crucial to get ahead of competitors by transforming traditional ERP into an Intelligent ERP system by harnessing cutting-edge technology.

Here are some tips on how to integrate emerging intelligent functionalities in your current ERP system:

𝟏. 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞:

Implementing machine learning algorithms to predict cash flow fluctuations. By analyzing historical financial data and external factors, the system provides real-time insights, enabling proactive measures to optimize cash management and mitigate financial risks.

𝟐. 𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬:

Utilizing blockchain to enhance transparency in financial transactions, especially in cross-border payments. Blockchain ensures secure, traceable, and tamper-proof transactions, reducing the risk of fraud and enhancing the efficiency of financial operations.

𝟑. 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 (𝐈𝐨𝐓) 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭:

Deploying IoT sensors to monitor the performance of critical high-value assets in a portfolio. Real-time data from these sensors enables intelligent decision-making for asset maintenance, ensuring optimal returns and minimizing risks.

𝟒. 𝐀𝐝𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐬:

Implementing advanced analytics tools to analyze customer financial behavior. This empowers financial institutions to tailor personalized financial products and services, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

𝟓. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭:

Integrating chatbots for financial customer support within SAP systems. These chatbots can assist with account inquiries, transaction history, and financial advice, providing a seamless and efficient customer experience.

6. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Financial Operations:

Automating repetitive manual tasks in financial reconciliation processes. RPA ensures accuracy, reduces processing time, and allows finance professionals to focus on more strategic activities, improving overall financial efficiency.

7.  Machine Learning Applications for Financial Predictions:

Incorporating machine learning applications to analyze market trends and predict stock prices. This enables financial analysts to make informed investment decisions, optimizing portfolio performance.

8. SAP Intelligent Robotics Process Automation in Financial Reporting:

Implementing intelligent RPA to automate financial reporting processes. This not only improves the speed and accuracy of financial reporting but also ensures compliance with regulatory requirements.

9. Situation Handling in Financial Risk Management:

Implementing intelligent situation handling to automatically respond to changes in market conditions that pose financial risks. This proactive approach minimizes potential losses and ensures effective risk management.

10. Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) for Financial Regulations:

Integrating GRC tools to ensure compliance with financial regulations. This includes automating compliance checks, managing financial risks, and enhancing overall governance in financial operations.

By incorporating these intelligent functionalities with a finance-focused approach, enterprises can revolutionize their SAP Finance ERP throughput, driving innovation and efficiency in financial operations. 🌟

DNA of a Digital Leader - Are you one ?

Digital leadership skills to drive successful changes within and across the organisation's eco-system is going to be among one of the most important skills of the future.

Here are some key characteristics required of a Digital Leader inorder to prepare & take on the disruptive waves of changes coming our way. #technology #digital #leadership #futureskills #sap

Delivering SAP Solutions the Agile way !

 With the ever-changing business environment where the pace of change is faster than ever before, being AGILE is a super-power on its own. Large-scale projects are now being delivered on an agile methodology. The possibility of using AGILE for complex projects is further validated when you see organizations like NASA developing critical applications for the Space Launch System (SLS) and other major projects using AGILE.

Here are some basic rules, tips & processes to run an efficient agile SAP solution development & delivery.

Some of the key advantages of using AGILE in SAP implementation

• Flexibility to change to cater to changing business requirements
• Priority-based development
• Frequent delivery of software
• Outcomes arising from deliverable are faster to address
• Leads to higher customer satisfaction as they get to see the program being built in every sprint
• Lowers the total IT cost, as resources are shared across multiple tasks
• High visibility and measurable results.
• The agile nature leads to better coordination as stakeholders are involved at every stage of the project
• Risks are identified early and can be managed in time

#agilemethodology #sap #projectmanager #activate #scrummaster

The HUMAN element in Digital Transformation

 #COVID19 has accelerated digital transformation across many industries and is turning out to be the impetus for a new breed of "intrapreneurs" to build solutions for the modern workplace, and the best way to go about this is to understand and address the human element in "Digital Transformation" before jumping on to new tools and technology.

Here are just a few thoughts on some of the key elements.

Remote working + Agile = A winning combination

Here are some tools that come in very handy for the remote-agile worker.

• MS Team - https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software
• Zoom - https://zoom.us/
• Trello - https://trello.com/
• JIRA - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
• Slack - https://slack.com/
• Miro - https://miro.com/
• Monday - https://monday.com/
• Dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/
• MS ToDo - https://todo.microsoft.com/

Twitter & Slack

For more news on ERP, Blockchain and general updates in the tech space, visit the below links. I've been busy posting a lot of new content and useful links in there.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/imssuren

Slack Channel: https://blockchainarena.slack.com/

Happy reading.

Integration Know-hows

In today’s world, integrating business systems to achieve maximum business benefit is of paramount importance and is the new way of doing things. Gone are the days when you could buy a product or a suite from one vendor and live with it for 5 to 10 years. 

These days it's all about buying the best in the breed and then integrating it with the rest to make it work and extract the most of what the “best-of-breed” can deliver to achieve real business growth. However, that said, given the concentration of a few big players in the business system space and the speed of acquisitions & mergers, most “best-in-class” systems are available under a single vendor’s umbrella now. This though doesn’t take away the need to integrate because these systems would have evolved organically and need integration with other systems to deliver the desired outcomes.

It was predicted by Gartner way back in 2005 that integration will begin to play a critical role in the success of business systems and they were right.

Fact: “Through 2020, integration work will account for 50% of the time and cost of building

a digital platform.” – Gartner

In the past integration was the last thing business system staff wanted to do, because of the lack of tools and the concern of over-complicating the existing infrastructure, however with the emergence of specialist integration providers like MuleSoft, Apigee, Zapier etc, today integration is more feasible and makes it possible for businesses to get it done with relative ease (easier said than done, I know).

With that in mind, now let’s look at how to go about preparing for an integration project.

First, there are a few questions to answer:

• Does your organisation have a defined technology roadmap and business systems strategy for the foreseeable future? 
• Do you have an integration architect/someone who knows much about the roadmap?
• What are the key business drivers that are pushing for the integration?
• What capabilities should the integrated solution provide? i.e. better decision models, better insights, improved business operations etc.

Once you have the above answered, it’s time to identify/decide on the form of integration that needs to be designed. i.e. whether it is going to focus on one particular area or is it going to be a hybrid of the below.

• Data Integration - Quality focus, Analytical focus or master data focus
• User Integration - User interface, device specific or user operation focused
• Process Integration – Application 2 Application, Business 2 Business, Customer specific or internal to the business

Identifying the above will help set a base to follow a methodological approach for systematic integration. Read more about this in the links available below.

Then the final and the most important step, is, of course, getting the job done, i.e. the actual setup & operation of the integrated solution with a project team and making it happen.

Remember, the success of an integrated solution is when it goes unnoticed to the users.

Here are some useful links on the Integration process:

https://headchannel.co.uk/6-steps-of-system-integration-process-321

https://www.mydbsync.com/blogs/9-important-steps-to-run-an-integration-project/

https://www.biztechcs.com/blog/seven-phases-system-integration-life-cycle/

https://www.nexonia.com/4-steps-to-a-successful-system-integration/

WELCOME 2019!

Get to know the basic terms in Blockchain

The sites below are some of the best if you intend to learn more about Blockchain and keep up-to-date with the latest development in the space.

• https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockChain/
• https://www.planetblockcha.in/
• https://everipedia.org/
• https://medium.com/tag/blockchain
• https://www.coindesk.com/

Happy reading!

Here are some mentionable Big Data Analytics Platforms.

Link

The user who cried wolf (Just Saying…)

The best part of working in a Business transformation ERP implementation project is the gratification you get knowing that your work is going to help the organization and its users move to the next level. However, the hunger to move to the next level is something that should be come from within the organization too,  if the users don’t have the hunger to change, then there is a problem. The insecure users are the ones who generally resist the move to change and would raise a fuss about every new thing done in their area. This resistance to change does get noticed by the wider organization over time. The real problem is that any future genuine concerns raised by the same individual might get treated as “noise” and this oversight might hit the entire organization where it hurts most, all because of that one individual who cried wolf too many times, just saying….

Practicing Enterprise Information Management (EIM) in an ERP

The old saying of “Information Is Wealth, Knowledge Is Power” cannot hold more significance than in the world that we live in today.

Information (data) has always been there, will always be there and will continue to grow, by 2020 the digital data generated will be approx 44 Zettabyte (ZB) compared to 4.4 ZB in 2013.

This exponential growth has seen the emergence of the new thinking behind "Big Data" and its importance in the digital world. The Big Data analytics market is a $203 billion one, it’s no big surprise that jobs such as Data Scientists are beginning to become mainstream.

Where is all this information coming from? Well, it is from every transaction taking place, every word that is spoken, every letter written in the whole wide world.

Today's ERP systems have evolved into a very complex set of integrated systems that read data from various sources and perform analytics to provide management with what they need.

However, an ERP is only one cog in the working wheel of an entire ecosystem, it is a known fact that there are various other platforms that play a vital role in decision making within an organisation. This is where a proper EIM (Enterprise Information Management) strategy can help to manage the information streaming in from all sources into and out of an organisation.

From an ERP’s perspective, the following EIM guidelines will help turn big data into “Big Value”:

• Improve Data quality - work on KPI relevant data, everything else is noise.
• Improving reporting models - reporting across the board is a waste of resource, instead, report on what needs to be addressed.
• Improving "Information digestibility" -  reports of the future are going to be concise and to the point. AI is going to condense information to arrive at simple “Do” or “Don’t Do” decision. Get ahead now and prepare for it.
• Improve information trust by harmonizing master data – If you have different versions of the truth, it’s all a lie. Centralize master data and improve data accuracy.
• Improve Business-ready information data sets - Go for solutions that give you up-to-date information that is updated at the frequency which you require for your business decision making, routine setups like scheduled programs, batch jobs etc are soon to be a thing of the past, don’t hold onto those.
• Reduce data liability – Too much of data that doesn’t serve any purpose could become a liability and weigh the business down. Practice information life-cycle management and archive the data where appropriate.
• Improve “Data on the Go” - “Best in Breed” implementation is the new thing.  Cloud-based specialized BI tools that integrate seamlessly with critical business data are beginning to gain prominence, make the most out of them.

By following proper EIM guidelines you could turn information into your "Strategic Asset”.

In today's world reporting on structured data is a given, however, the ability to identify & decipher unstructured data could be the game changer because what we know is a drop in the ocean of what we don't know.

A 10 step approach to designing & delivering an integrated solution

When talking about integrating an ERP solution with internal or external systems, it’s easy to get carried away with the details to the extent that a high-level streamlined plan is often overlooked.


Given my experience in the industry, I thought I’ll put down a simple 10 step plan that if followed at
a high-level will at least guarantee an effective integrated system being delivered.

1.Firstly, list down the key processes, those that at a high-level cover the many facets of the business, these are processes such as Procure-to-pay, Make-to-stock, make-to-order etc.

2.Next draw up some process flow diagrams of these business processes. Given that these are existing process there is likely to already be process flows when the initial implementation was done (if you don’t have them, contact the hiring managers and inform them that these documents are the lost intellectual property for the company because of the few $100 that was saved employing an amateur)

3.Identify each process by its system components, e.g. Finance & Controlling, Sales & Distribution, Material Management etc.

4.Identify the relevant business process owners and departments handling each of the above business processes identified, these names are important for actual integration testing.

5.Draw up different scenarios for each of these processes and perform integration testing for each of these scenarios, these should follow the same sequence as the process flow diagrams.

6.Pass onto the business owner’s the ownership of their business processes, they need to feel the ownership and take responsibility for their process when the system goes live.

7.Always records all test results, issues, errors or problems.

8.Perform the routine processes of addressing the issue. Make sure any missed processes are recorded, validated and implemented.

9.Setup workshops/ training session where the business owners run them for all the internal users, try and keep this session very interactive and interesting, otherwise the end-users will see these are extra work rather than taking ownership. Refer to my post  - 13. Training vs Educating (Just Sayin>

10. The key now before GO LIVE, is to make sure all the  concerned parties have a clear idea of the areas integrated and the importance of doing their tasks correctly, no matter how good the integrated solution is if the users don’t know how to use it then this solution might not fly, so make sure the users know how to use the tools to make the delivery a success.

There you go , a high-level simple check-list of the 10 steps to help design& manage & deliver an integrated solution, all the best.

Skills that matter !!

I strongly believe it’s the mix and match of technical and personal skills that makes a consultant tick, keeping this in mind I have listed out some important personal skills that every consultant needs to be aware of, and most importantly practice!!

Interpersonal & Communication skills

• Remember consulting is 70% listening and 30 % talking. So listen more until you know exactly what the client wants and rephrase the same requirement to  get it confirmed from the clients before beginning to work on it, most importantly always have it in black and white.

• In any meeting give the customer the first 10 minutes of it, and if possible get others from the clients side involved in the initial discussions too, this gives you time to assess the situations your clients are in and identify the key players in the meeting, then you can begin to discuss your points with these key players.

• Keep it simple, simple and simple. Use jargon with your colleagues who understand and would praise the fact you know these, but avoid doing this with a customer who isn’t familiar with these jargons, speak the customer’s language.

• After your first interaction with a potential client on what your services or product is about, make sure to draft a document with most of the exact same words you used during the discussion and circulate it with him. This way there is a record of it and he could get back to it anytime he would like to. Always inform your clients to let you know if someone else is interested in your service so you could approach them directly, referrals most often than not, work well.

• Be truthful, period. If there is something you are not sure of, it's always fine to let the customer know that you will research on the matter and get back to him, and make 100% sure you do in the next 48 hours.

Keeping customers in mind

• A general rule that all consultants have to play with is that “Customers are king”, that’s fine cause they pay for the service or product, but a consultant should be able to question a clients assumption, ask "why not” questions if the clients assumption are vague!!

• Always rehearse the question in your mind before putting it across, it’s a combination of good questions and good confident answers that’s shows the consultants ability to understand the issue at hand.

• You must have the ability to say “No” sometimes in the best interest of the projects, however before making this call its always better to get another perspective on it and always be nice about it.

• Do something the customer would appreciate but didn’t ask for. There is fine line between doing this and doing too much, so make a realistic delivery plan before doing so and keep the client informed of the plan.

• Always consider the impact a decision in the project can have on the project environment, best way to do this is to keep other relevant parties informed as well when an important decision is made. No one likes to feel left out!!

Brand Image & Attitude

• As a consultant you are selling yourself together with the service and product. You are your own BRAND ambassador. Make sure you have everything set to make a good first impression, because like the saying goes 'there is never a second chance to make a good first impression'.

• Don’t make Promises you can’t keep, and if you can’t keep your promises…. don’t make excuses!!!

• If you have promised your customer you will deliver something against a deadline, make sure to send a reminder that you are working on it!! Clients like to know that someone is working on it rather than being left in the dark.

• As a consultant you’ll have a lot of challenges, just enjoy it and keep moving forward. Remember Murphy’s Law "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”, but remember it’s your reaction in the end that could determine the outcome of such a situation.

All the best.  Hope you liked that. Your comments, feedback and suggestions are welcome at ssurenlk@msn.com

"Freeze the base" - Importance of a Scope Baseline Plan

In most projects, one thing that generally hits the project managers hard is to define what is in scope and what’s not. This is by far one of the most important sub-project plan since it determines the work involved, the resources required, budget required, the final project deliverable and sign-offs required to close the project. Given all these you need to make sure all the elements that make up a scope baseline are addressed at the earliest and communicated to the stakeholders of the project.

Drawing up a Scope Baseline.

The 3 most important documents that should be part of a Scope baseline are:

1. Work Breakdown Structure - The WBS defines each deliverable and further decomposes in deliverable into smaller work packages.
2. WBS Dictionary - The WBS Dictionary contains the actual detailed description of the work required, and is often a very detailed and technical description of each work package.
3. Scope Statement -The Project Scope Statement includes the product scope description and the project deliverable, and it also defines the product user acceptance criteria.

Once the deliverables are confirmed in the scope statement, they need to be developed into a work breakdown structure (WBS) of all the deliverables in the project. The scope baseline includes all the deliverables produced on the project, and therefore identifies all the work to be done. The following should form part of the scope baseline plan:

• All the activities and individual tasks that need to be done to achieve the deliverable identified.
• The resource required for each of the tasks identified. Likely resource constraints, their involvement and ability to execute each task in the available time frame.
• Part of the time management plan e.g. time required for the tasks identified.
• Estimated cost of resources for each tasks based on some notional unit of calculation.
• A complete schedule linking all tasks, resources and time estimates. With start and end dates clearly laid out.
• Identified dependant tasks and their involvement in the critical path.
• Setup a cost baseline which should include a time based budget as well, i.e. a milestone based budget gateway taking into account the cost of resources and cost of time taken to complete the tasks in the WBS dictionary.

With all the above in a scope baseline plan it’s easier to control the momentum of the projects progress.  However, there is always a likelihood that Scope changes are required as the project goes forward, that’s because not everything can be determined upfront, so educate your project sponsors of the likely area a scope creep could occur and always plan to keep some project budget available for these scope additions, after all, these could end up being project deliverables that are an absolute must to achieve the company’s objectives.

I’ll like to think that every Project is like a "Skier" sliding down a “snow slope“which can be thought of as the Scope, if you have a locked in scope that would equate to a good body of snow with the right density, then you will most likely cruise through the project deliverable s and close the project successfully, but if not, then get ready for a wobbly ride ahead !!

Hope this helps. Drop me your queries & comments on ssurenlk@msn.com.

Cloud Ready or Not !!

Many business these days are considering a move to the cloud, some want to get there but lack a could strategy, some want to stay partly "on-premise" and partly in the cloud,  and some don't know where to be, well this article is to provide some tips that management could consider before deciding  if "Cloud" is for them or not.

Some of the key items I've come across when considering a cloud move are listed below:

• Cost of current software licensing, performing tuning, upgrades, fixes, patches & equipment maintenance are some of the cost of an on-premise solution that needs to be considered and compared with the cost of moving to the cloud. A TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis is vital before considering the move.

• Understand the business areas and process that can be broken down into smaller chunks before moving to the cloud. Phased approach seems to be the most widely used cutover model used by most organizations, make sure you go for something small that can be pulled back at an early stage if things go "pear" shaped.

• Make sure that the organization has the ability to be able to manage roles for people in the cloud. Most of the cloud solution these days focus on user experience which states the fact that its mostly going to be user role base. 

• Choose the right partner - Like any IT implementation, make sure you choose the right vendor who is going to support you throughout your organization's transition to the cloud.

• Be open and honest about what is available currently within the organization. IT infrastructure has got to change, people's thinking needs to change and the businesses need to have an adoptive culture, if none of these can be done, cloud is not for you at least not until you get these issues sorted first.

• Get the business involved, this is an extension of my previous point, make sure you get the business users to also buy in on the cloud move. Moving to the cloud is not just an IT Strategic decision is also a business operating decision , keep in mind that this is something that's going to have an impact on the entire business & its operating style.

Hope you found these tips useful, this is by no means an exhaustive list but I believe this is a good starting point to address if your business is "Cloud Ready" or NOT.

Line 'em up and Knock 'em down in 2015 !!

Go hard this year, in your next New Year celebration have a reason to party like crazy about a successful year just gone by !!

The below tips might  come in handy to make it count this year, all applies equally.

• Be agile, prepare yourself for change and be able to respond to it. This is crucial for personal survival as well as surviving and thriving in a business landscape.

• It’s all about the user, make the user experience fantastic and they’ll stick with you. Think CUSTOMER!!

• If you are looking for resources for what you want, go places looking for it, remember the more you stick at home and look for resources at your immediate vicinity, your competitors are all over the place grabbing the best one !! It’s called Globalresourcetrotting!!

• Up skill yourself on generalized skill and then target specialised skills.

• Make everything available on the web, open up yourself and your products to the world; the web is your market!!

• Dont always expect everything to happen under your feet, decentralise and get the best out of what you need. Remember a Ship that doesn’t sail too far off the shore doesn’t sail too far!! – A true entrepreneur should be able to delegate tasks and venture into new areas.

• Give out material that is relevant to your product, advertise intelligently, get away from the norms, get away from old school thinking....dare to do something new, something different.

• Learn from your own growth, if it has worked previously...go with it, don’t break the cycle, whether its growth or decline, you can’t change it, everything repeats itself in cycles.

• Network, network, network, people would only hire you when they know you. In a skills-for-hire economy, your network is how you find the opportunities. 

Last but not the least, BE A BABY! Yeah that’s right, studies found that babies learn at an exponential rate, simply because everything is new to them and they are curious about everything!! 

Start that off with yourself, question yourself, ask why, experience something new.... take a swing at life before it has one at you!!

All the best, make this YEAR really count!!

"Freeze the base" - Important of a Scope Baseline Plan

In most projects, one thing that generally hits the project manager hard is to define whats in the projects Scope and what’s not. This is by far one of the most important plans since it determines the work involved, the resources required, budget required for these resources, the final project deliverables and signoffs required to close the project. Given all these you need to make sure all the elements that make up a scope baseline are addressed at the earliest and communicated to the stakeholders of the project.

Drawing up a Scope Baseline.

The 3 most important documents that should be part of a Scope baseline are:

1. Work Breakdown Structure - The WBS defines each deliverable and further decomposes in deliverable into smaller work packages.
2. WBS Dictionary - The WBS Dictionary contains the actual detailed description of the work required, and is often a very detailed and technical description of each work package.
3. Scope Statement -The Project Scope Statement includes the product scope description and the project deliverable, and it also defines the product user acceptance criteria.

Once the deliverables are confirmed in the scope statement, they need to be developed into a work breakdown structure (WBS) of all the deliverables in the project. The scope baseline includes all the deliverables produced on the project, and therefore identifies all the work to be done. The following should form part of the scope baseline plan:

• All the activities and individual tasks that need to be done to achieve the deliverable identified.
• The resource required for each of the tasks identified. Likely resource constraints, their involvement and ability to execute each task in the available time frame.
• Part of the time management plan e.g. time required for the tasks identified.
• Estimated cost of resources for each tasks based on some notional unit of calculation.
• A complete schedule linking all tasks, resources and time estimates. With start and end dates clearly laid out.
• Identified dependant tasks and their involvement in the critical path.
• Setup a cost baseline which should include a time based budget as well, i.e. a milestone based budget gateway taking into account the cost of resources and cost of time taken to complete the tasks in the WBS dictionary.

With all the above in a scope baseline plan it’s easier to control the momentum of the projects progress.  However, there is always a likelihood that Scope changes are required as the project goes forward, that’s because not everything can be determined upfront, so educate your project sponsors of the likely area a scope creep could occur and always plan to keep some project budget available for these scope additions, after all, these could end up being project deliverables that are an absolute must to achieve the company’s objectives.

I’ll like to think that every Project is like a “Skier” sliding down a “base of snow“which can be thought of as the Scope, if you have a good frozen base, then you will most likely cruise through the project deliverables and close the project successfully, but if not, then get ready for a wobbly ride ahead !!

Hope this helps. Drop me your queries & comments on ssurenlk@msn.com

Making BIG DATA, small.

The term "Big data" is a terms that has caught up with the many business IT teams that drown in large data pools. Anyone who has been involved with processing or working with large amounts of data, will be able to tell you the challenges they face in deciphering the useful information in the data.

Big data can be used as a blanket term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The volume of business data worldwide, across all companies, doubles every 1.2 years -Wikipedia.

If you are an organization that runs an ERP system chances are that there is a lot of data flowing through your IT & Logistic network which you have designed to capture in your ERP system, in order to report them in BI tools for the important decision makers within the company. However, there are many occasion when these individual are drowning in data but starved of information.

 This is not something new, everyone has gone through this for sure. The best way then to make big data small is to understand what you are looking to get out of it.

• Know who is giving you the big data and only filter the data from the data points that will have an impact on the final decision
• Understanding what the end result should be will help eliminate the noise in the big data
• Understanding the decision making process itself will help to bring out the relevant data sets from the overall data pool
• Setting up user cases will help breakdown the big data into specific user case scenarios
• Understanding the roles (the role I'm referring to is the role of the "business objective" in the company's overall strategic initiative and not the common man's role) that will be using the big data is another method to breakdown the analysis into smaller chunks.
• Most importantly the nature of the decision to be made will determine if we are actually dealing with big data or would a small set of the sample data actually suffice.

All the above are simple tasks which you've already probably done in your day to day tasks, but sometimes when dealing with big data we can get too engrossed in it , that we think every bit of data is important and end up creating our own variation of big data and confusing ourselves in the process.

Hope you found this post informative. 

Watch out for "Point & Click" Solutions

By S.Suren

More often than not in any system implementation you would come across a solution which caters to just the one particular business challenge, this is what is termed as the "PCS - Point & Click Solution". As the name suggests this tends to be a solution that is provided for only what is seen and not for what is not in focus but still constitutes vital working elements in the overall environment.

It is also very likely that there have been other significant changes that have come about in other process areas due to this particular solution that has been implemented. Doing a proper "Requirement Profiling" will help eliminate a situation like this occurring.

The key steps of Requirement profiling :

• Identify the business system landscape and where exactly in this landscape does the business challenge reside.
• Identify information tunnels flowing inwards and outwards from this business area.
• Ascertain if the solution needs to be deployed in any  preceding or succeeding activity as well. This can done by drawing up a process map.
• Identify the impacted users of this business, which departments they relate to etc.
• Identify the business drivers behind the requirement. Who and what changes in the business has brought about this requirement.
• Identify the business risks of deploying the solution in the current business areas and also other integrated business functions.
• Most importantly also try and identify other solutions that are being put in other areas of the business which could potentially be integrated later on.

Performing the above profiling activities will help to understand the overall environment where this business requirement & challenges reside and also help with identifying the best approach in deploying a solution.

There are many other similar approaches to profiling a requirement and these would be carried as part of requirement gathering / blueprinting , however this doesn't always happen and therefore performing a thorough requirement profiling activity as part of requirement gathering would certainly help.

Hope you found this post informative. There is so much more that can be added on this topic which I shall do later on in my future posts.

Have a nice day.