The Amazing World of Blogging

I got a comment on a blog post tonight. That's pretty rare. But what's truly amazing is that the blog post was made in April 2007 -- over 2 years ago! It was my third ever blog post.

I guess this just emphasises that you never know who is reading what you write. Thank you to that annonymous commenter from Poland that decided to share their thoughts on that post. It really made my day.

The blog post was http://gaspodethewonderdog.blogspot.com/2007/04/goodnight-kiwi.html

A New Home for Vjeko's Blog

Way back in February of this year, I made a post about a blog that appeared on my Google Alerts for Navision that really caught my eye.

Now Vjeko's blog has moved to a new home: http://www.NavigateIntoSuccess.com. It has a new sleek look, new features, but the same fantastic content that has kept many readers returning again and again.

If the number of comments a blog receives is a testament to it's success then Vjeko has done extremely well over this last year. His articles regularly receive many comments from readers and he always takes the time to answer the comments.

Vjeko often writes in-depth, well researched, and informative posts on Dynamics NAV and Sure Step. I am a little biased, since we have just finished co-writing a book; however, if you are not already a subscriber to his blog, go and check it out. Now that the book is finished, we will both have more time for blogging and forum posting.

Everybody Lies

The Dr. House approach to requirements analysis

This posting was first published on the Intergen Blog Site on the 26th September.

Gregory House M.D. is a maverick medical genius who, in each TV episode, heads a team of diagnosticians in their attempts to diagnose an unfortunate patient’s mystery illness. House’s signature phrase is “Everybody lies” although, for his character, it’s more than just a saying, it’s a philosophy. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how the “everybody lies” approach can be applied to requirements analysis in order to reduce costs and improve overall project quality.

It seems odd to claim that everybody lies. Just as there’s no good reason for a patient to lie to a physician who is trying to save their life, we don’t expect a business person to lie when we’re gathering requirements. The modern-day philosopher, Homer Simpson, has this to say on the subject of lying: “Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.” Homer’s insight helps us understand the fundamental problem: the users must tell us the truth but as analysts we are equally responsible for finding it.

Before I try to convince you of my rather tongue-in-cheek methodology, you should first understand that getting requirements right is a serious business. Research from Barry Boehm and Philip Papaccio has shown that defects introduced early in a project, such as in the requirements analysis phase, can cost 50 to 200 times more to fix later in the project than if they had been corrected close to the point at which they were introduced. 50 to 200 times – that’s a staggering difference!

Gathering requirements means capturing business problems, not computer problems. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes (or Gregory House for that matter) to understand that the first step in solving a problem is to clearly identify what the actual problem is. Building a solution based on the wrong requirements can be a costly mistake to make, but how exactly can we apply our new “everyone lies” approach to requirements analysis and avoid getting it wrong? One approach could be to shout “liar” every time a user describes a requirement, but some may find this a little disturbing. First we need to understand the nature of the lies and how to avoid them.

The first problem I have discovered is that people like to describe solutions and not requirements. If I had a signature phrase for requirements analysis it would be, “That’s not a requirement, it’s a solution!” I’ll admit it’s not as catchy as “everybody lies” but the sentiment’s the same.

A requirement is the answer to a “what” type of question and should always be expressed in business terms. A solution is more of an answer to a “how” type question. There’s an easy way to tell the difference between requirements and solutions: if you can implement it, it’s a solution.

Writing down a solution instead of a requirement happens frequently, but most of the time we get away with it because it just so happens that the solution we’ve written is correct. No harm, no foul; but what happens when the solution isn’t correct? Remember that equation we had before? 50 to 200 times more expensive to fix. That’s why we get the requirements signed off to make sure they’re correct, because no-one would sign off on requirements when they’re not correct. Or would they?

Having a signed off requirements document means nothing if the requirements are wrong – we’re still going to need to fix the defects and our goal is to reduce the project costs, not just our costs. Let’s assume that no one would sign off requirements that they know to be wrong, so it must be that they’re not understood, but this raises a new mystery: why do people agree to requirements when they don’t understand them?

The problem starts when we use the wrong language to describe requirements. If we’re not using business terms, we’re putting the business users at a disadvantage. It can typically go one of two ways: either the business user says, “Hey I’m sorry but I don’t understand this requirement so I can’t agree to it”, or they say, “I don’t understand this requirement but the consultant seems pretty confident that he’s right, so I’ll just keep quiet. If it’s wrong someone else will pick it up later on.”

So the next time you find yourself writing a requirements document, remember that you’re a detective and not a secretary. It’s your job to find the real problems in business terms and not simply record what you’re told. When people tell you that the captured requirements are correct, ask them to explain them to you, just to check they’re not lying.

In my next post, I’ll explore the “Tourette’s Syndrome” approach to handling support calls.

Does anyone use NAV in Wyoming, West Virginia, New Mexico, or Alaska?

My blog has just reached 1000+ visitors from the USA. Cool! But there are four states missing. It's sad, but I had to look on another web site to find out what the missing states were - Google Analytics doesn't show the state names of those that have no visitors and I'm not good at the geography of the USA.

Now excuse me for being a complete dunce, but are there any people actually living in Alaska? Do they have internet connections?

Before I moved to New Zealand I wasn't even sure if they had cinemas, so as far as I know Wyoming doesn't even have a state lottery. Maybe West Virginia is three-quarters forest. Who knows, maybe New Mexico was the testing ground for the first atomic bomb. Perhaps Alaska is the United State's largest state and is over twice the size of Texas; measuring from north to south the state is approximately 1,400 miles long and measuring from east to west it is 2,700 miles wide.

The internet's an amazing thing isn't it? Anyway, I'm going to look for some blogs in Alaska and leave a comment or a track back.

On a completely unrelated topic, I'm now a Dynamics NAV expert (see the current featured article on MSDynamicsWorld.com.) Now when I started my first job many years ago, an old and wise programmer told me what he thought of experts. He said, "So you're the new expert are you? Well X is an unknown quantity and spurt is a drip under pressure. X-spurt. Geddit?"

Ahhh. English humour.

I just installed Snap Shots on my Blog

Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

Dynamics NAV 2009 – A Paradigm Shift for Business Solutions

Dynamics NAV is already a highly-successful, award-winning ERP solution but the forthcoming release is set to bring something quite extraordinary to the middle-tier business solutions market.

The Dynamics NAV team promises a ground-breaking user interface, a state-of-the-art technology platform, and web-services enablement while remaining true to their core product values of simplicity, adaptability and ease-of-use. You have to admit that when it comes to telling you how good their products are going to be, nothing can compete with the Microsoft marketing machine.

To read more, click this link to my posting on the Intergen Blog site... The Changing Face of ERP

Who is Blogging on Dynamics NAV? (in English)

I thought doing a roundup of blogs on Dynamics would be a nice easy way to make a post. I can’t believe how many there are. You can get a larger list of blogs on any subject through Technorati or doing a blog search in Google.

I have ignored any blogs that are in funny languages (i.e. not English) and any that seem to have only just started, given up after one post or not posted for a long time. The order of the blogs is the order in which they appeared in Technorati at the time of writing and then some others that I know of that didn’t appear. I am being very subjective and different people want different things from Blogs. Personally I want some form of entertainment around the subject matter that doesn’t make me think too much. If I learn something from reading the post – this is a bonus. If I missed your blog, I’m sorry. Drop a comment on the end of this post with the URL and I’ll add it (unless I don’t like it – in which case I’ll pretend I never got your comment.)

Plataan
http://plataan.typepad.com/microsoftdynamics/
I think this is a team effort but I can’t find details about the writers in English. The blog has fairly regular posts on Dynamics NAV. Technical stuff and news. I don’t read this blog too often but I do have it on my RSS Feeds. The content I have read seems good, solid, but not really that entertaining.

Kine’s info
http://msmvps.com/blogs/kine/default.aspx
I think this is the first Dynamics NAV blog I read. Not a regular poster but almost guaranteed to teach you something. This is on my RSS list.

Waldo’s Blog
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/waldo/default.aspx
Ahh Waldo, what would we do without you? Eric Wauters is a frequent blogger and often has the most read posts on the dynamicsuser.net forum. I really appreciate the time Waldo puts into his blog. Some of the content is a roundup of information that is available elsewhere, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If it’s about NAV and worth knowing, you can be almost certain to read about it on Waldo’s blog. Some postings are very technical but I often learn stuff.

Microsoft Dynamics Sustained Engineering Team
http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_dynamics_nav_sustained_engineering/default.aspx
Microsoft Dynamics Sustained Engineering Team. Regular posts direct from the guys that know. You should definitely add this to your regular feeds. Often technical in nature (as you would expect) it is good to hear from the Dynamics Team.

Gaspode’s Brain Dump
http://gaspodethewonderdog.blogspot.com/
The blog from the dog. I try to post the maximum amount of entertainment for the minimum amount of effort. I try very hard not to “re-post” content. I tried having a blog on dynamicsuser.net instead of blogspot as this gave me a very large number of hits but I felt a bit constrained. I didn’t feel I could really rant about Microsoft or post non-Dynamics stuff there. I like being able to review Google Analytics stats on my site – something I don’t think I could do on the other site, so I put up with the low readership and lack of comments.

Bart van Beek (Dynamics NAV Dev)
http://mibuso.com/blogs/bartvanbeek
I’d not come across this before writing the article but the site looks nice and contains details of a whole bunch of NAV add-ons you can download from MIBUSO.

Revolution1210.com
http://www.revolution1210.com/nav.asp
This is another one I had not heard of before researching this post. I like this one because Ian has posted a link to my blog in his top 10 of NAV blogs. This is a great blog. Lots of content that are just the right length. I am definitely going to take some time and read through the old posts and add this one to my RSS.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/nav/default.aspx
Another blog from the Dynamics Team. You have to subscribe to this. Infrequent posts but it’s always good to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

Mark Brummel
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/mark_brummel/
Not a regular poster but I like Mark’s blog. One of the first ones to make it onto my RSS list. Mark’s series of posts from TechEd 2007 were a real stand out. A great effort and real contribution to the community.

Confessions of a Dynamics NAV Consultant
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/alexchow/default.aspx
I think Alex Chow gets the award for the best blog name. Not many posts but I love the posting on a question of morality. There needs to be more of this sort of thing. Blogging on NAV doesn’t have to be all about code and solving problems. Sometimes it’s good to just blow off some steam. The other posts look very useful and some handy tips in there that could save you some pain.

DynamicsUser.NET Admin’s Blog
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/admin/default.aspx
Not many posts but Erik P. Ernst is the administrator of dynamicsuser.net and an MVP. I have learnt interesting stuff and come across other good blogs through Erik’s posts.

Nuno Maia’s Dynamics Blog
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/nunomaia/default.aspx
Not many posts but a lot of good stuff. This guy knows his stuff. This one is on my RSS list.

Navigate Into Success
http://www.navigateintosuccess.com
I like this guys blog. Funny. Informative and he clearly knows what he is talking about. Plus he’s added comments on my blog and linked to it on his blog roll. What a guy! Definitely worth a look.

Thanks for the comments! Here are some of the ones I missed:

Belgian Dynamics Community
http://dynamicscom.be/blogs/
This seems to be largely syndication of other blogs with more than a few appearances of posts from Waldo. But there were some original posts on there and I particularly liked the post from Fontini on certification. Not all posts are in English (funny that being Belgian!)

Singleton
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/singleton/
David Singleton is well known within the Dynamics NAV community for his extensive work and posting on the DynamicsUser forum and for his The Dynamics Book project that is now a wiki site. The posts go way back to 2006 but they average at just over one a month. Maybe the comment is enough: The Blog of David Singleton (Need I say more?)

Microsoft Dynamics NAV UK Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/uknav/
I guess it's hard for an official blog like this to post anything interesting. It is typical to get lots of posts about news that is available on PartnerSource and links to official downloads. Not my cup of tea.

Navision-Girl
http://www.navision-girl.com
This was one of the first blogs that regularly appeared on my Google Alerts. I must admit I didn't like it that much because of the "obvious" nature (to me) of some of the posts. Having said that I took a look for the first time in a long while after it was added to the comments and I really liked what I saw. I think I will be re-subscribing to this one.

Here are some others that I had on my RSS feeds that I didn't mention earlier:

Navision Freak's Blog
http://navisionfreak.blogspot.com/
No posts for a while but there is some good stuff on here. All the cross-over NAV and SQL topics are particularly interesting to me.

Navision Tips & Tricks
http://navitips.blogspot.com/
Again no recent posts but I really like what is there. Worth a browse.

Stefano Demiliano
http://demiliani.com/blog/Default.aspx
Regular posts of the highest technical quality from a guy who really knows. I can't beleive I missed this one from my first post. There are a fantastic variety of topics on technologies that are going to become more and more important for Dynamics consultants. Definitely subscribe to this one!

Tips dBits - Tricks Navision / Dynamics NAV
http://tricksnavision.blogspot.com/
Good solid content but nothing new since October last year. Some good tips in the old posts are worth a read.

Dynamics Blog - Check this out!

I have a "Google Alert" set up to keep me up to date with news and blog postings that mention Dynamics NAV, Navision, etc. It is rare that the links are that interesting, but today it came up with a link to a blog that shows there are some real gems out there! I have even added the link to my Favourite Blogs links on the right. You can find the blog at http://dynamicsblog.wordpress.com/.

The first handful of posts were very useful, well written and funny. Presenting technical and useful material in a manner that is interesting to read is not an easy thing to do. The author also writes about nearly giving up due to a lack of comments or readers. I know what that's like too!

Nice one Vjeko! Let's hope you keep the posts coming.

Happy New Year to you all!

Well it’s nearly the end of 2007 and I can’t let the year finish without wishing you all a Happy New Year! Thank you to everyone that has taken the time to subscribe to or read my blog over the last few months. I started this blog in April to help me learn to write. It’s been challenging but fun.

Since starting the blog, I’ve had over a 1000 visits from over 60 countries (see map). Incredibly I have not had a single comment posted. I guess I should not be surprised since I regularly read blog posts but rarely make a comment. If you read this, make a comment – even if it’s just to say “Hi”.

The most popular content by far has been my write up of Dynamics NAV 5.1 Reporting and Web Services. I took the time to review the video preview of the upcoming release and wrote what I saw and gave my opinion. This goes to show how much interest there is in the new version of Dynamics NAV (now codenamed as “6.0” but more than likely to be called “Dynamics NAV 2009.”)

I spent a lot of time researching and writing a series of postings on the new send-to-application feature in NAV 5.0. This exercise was time consuming and ultimately fruitless. It’s hard to know what to write about. I wanted this blog to be original and tried to avoid re-posting news from other sites or forums. I am still perplexed as to how you get your blog postings included in the Google Alerts for Dynamics NAV.

Probably the most satisfying moment was when the good people at PACKT publishing agreed to send me a free copy of David Studebaker’s book on programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV in return for a review posted on my blog and Amazon. I was really stoked to get something free from my blog. I am pleased with my book review but I don’t think David or Packt were that impressed.

2007 has been a tough year but I am looking forward to 2008. IT is a funny business, we’re always looking for the next big thing. I’m sure as soon as I get my hands on the new Dynanics NAV I’ll be wanting the next realease. One of the real highlights of my working year has been working with one of the industries real stars. Chommy Cash is a NAV and .NET programmer extrordinaire who is sadly leaving us to start an Alpaca farm in the Himalayas. Chommy, if you’re reading this (which I’m sure you won’t since you never read anything I write), I’ll miss you and wish you all the best for the future.

Enjoy your celebrations, and remember to add to your resolutions: “I must leave comments on the blogs I read.”

Wasps: Are they really Yellow?

Ashely has written a great blog posting on the Intergen blog site titled Wasps: Are they really Yellow?

This reminded me of why I wanted to start blogging. I wanted to write and I thought that blogging was a good way to practice writing. I think most bloggers find that, however motivated they once were, they run out of time and ideas and posting gets harder and harder.

The Intergen blog is a great place for Intergenites to post ideas and thoughts. If you like technology, you should subscribe. At the very least, you should take the 5 minutes or so to read Ashley's post. Who knows, you could maybe even leave a comment.

The NAV Team has its own Blog!

Wow! Great news. Finally the NAV team has its own blog. I am looking forward to some great content - particularly with all the changes coming in NAV. I have read some of the blogs that the team have linked to and hope to see some equally in-depth coverage on this new site. I particularly liked the posts on the Dynamics NAV Sustained Engineering blog. This is what we want!

The URL is http://blogs.msdn.com/nav. Enjoy!