Typical Microsoft Dynamics NAV Implementation Blunders

Sometimes a failed implementation threatens to scare off prospective customers, especially if the local market is small, the customer involved large, and the needs especially vertical. In these situations, everybody will know that a project has failed the moment it does, and the solution, be it Microsoft Dynamics NAV or any other for that matter, will be immediately labeled as “bad.”

Standish Group has spent over 14 years researching the high project-failure rates in IT, and published its findings in its famous CHAOS Report every two years or so. The report explains, among many other things, the factors that make a project a success or a failure. To consider a project a failure, it must either exceed the allocated time and budget, or it must fail altogether. By this definition, Standish Group finds only about 35% of projects successful, while an astounding 65% of projects go down.

The typical causes of failure are lack of user involvement, incomplete and changing requirements and specifications, lack of executive support, lack of planning, and unrealistic or unclear objectives. On the other hand, typical success factors are user involvement, executive management support, clear objectives, optimized scope and formal methodology.

Another research report provides similarly unsettling data. Of all surveyed companies involved in failed IT projects, 73 percent cited lack of business management support, 75 percent cited change of business objectives during the project, and 77 percent cited poor planning and poor project management.

What these figures tell us is that implementations of IT software—including Microsoft Dynamics--rarely fail because of the software itself. ...