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104 Chapter 4 • Development Life Cycle

comprehensive set of changes to an organization, spanning improvements to business processes,
technology, and human performance, all aligned with an organization’s overall strategy.
This methodology is best suited for full life cycle projects where organizations expect to
involve either custom-built solutions or a blend of custom and packaged components. In
addition, it is intended for use on medium to large projects that implement a full life cycle
custom-built BI solution and comprises the BIM content areas that are relevant to custom
solution planning, delivery, and operations:
The planning phase. The objective of this phase is to help an organization define appropri-
ate strategies and approaches for achieving an enduring competitive advantage and building
stakeholder value. The planning phase defines new and improved business capabilities to
support the organization’s strategies and creates detailed plans to help the organization
effectively and efficiently implement changes—and realize and sustain value—during the
delivering and operating phases.
The delivering phase (aka the standard or custom route). This phase translates the business
architecture into a specific business capability. A business capability is the combination of
human performance, business process, and technology that collectively creates value by
improving business performance. The delivering phase defines a cross-competency
approach for taking each business capability from blueprint to deployment.
The managing phase. This phase directs, coordinates, and monitors the activities outlined
in the other three phases, in order to achieve improved business results. This phase
determines whether the proposed business values were achieved; the projects and change
journey were effectively managed; there was an ongoing alignment of context, content,
and course of action; the necessary levels of ownership, sponsorship, commitment, and
leadership were achieved; and the program sponsor or stakeholder expectations were met
or exceeded.
The operating phase. This phase operates the new business capabilities that were created
in the delivering phase. Operating is based on the definitions of sourcing strategies, service
providers, and customers, which were established in the planning phase. The work in this
phase must meet the formal service targets and metrics established in earlier phases, and it
must provide feedback for improvements based on measurements of actual performance
against those targets.

AGILE DEVELOPMENT The agile development methodology has gained popularity over the
past decade for traditional software development. This success has helped this methodology
migrate to ERP implementations. Here is a key reason for this success:

At the core of any agile approach is an assumption that whatever the requirements
might be at the beginning of a project, they won’t be the same at the end of the project.
The longer the project, the more truth there is in this assumption. To mitigate this
situation, agile methodologies start with smaller sets of requirements, they start small
and deliver functionality incrementally in a series of releases. No single release covers
all requirements, but every release delivers more than the previous one. 2

2 Is agile ERP implementation possible? (March 11, 2009). Retrieved on October 2010 from http://community.dynamics.com/
product/nav/navnontechnical/b/navigateintosuccess/archive/2009/03/11/is-agile-erp-implementation-possible-63.aspx