Six challenges of enterprise Dynamics 365 projects with Andrew Bibby and Dani Kahil

#116. Dani Kahil interviews Andrew Bibby about a pivotal, multi-year Dynamics 365 business transformation project in financial services.

Dani Kahil and Andrew Bibby are both Microsoft Business Applications MVPs. Dani is an independent consultant and online trainer specialising in requirements analysis and solution envisioning. Andrew Bibby is a founder of Proximo 3, a Microsoft training and advisory partner based in the UK.

Dani and Andrew discuss:

• How Andrew's client engaged him as an advisor to help the customer and their Microsoft partner organisations work effectively together.
• They started with a proof of concept to evaluate the Dynamics 365 platform and their agile way of working.
• The customer had an application landscape including Dynamics 365, Azure, and on-premise systems.
• How a single productivity business goal supported the project's business case.
• Grappling with an agile approach and ultimately settling on a hybrid approach that involved lots of upfront requirements analysis and design (and the affects of this).
• The importance of both the product owner and the scrum master in an agile team.
• Using Azure DevOps to track requirements and realised the value in requirements traceability all the way from inception through to production releases.
• Configuring Azure DevOps with a custom work item template to make it easier to capture requirements.
• Challenges ensuring user stories were sufficiently detailed so that developers could understand them and how the team experience and tackled the challenge of requirements changing (or being clarified) mid sprint.
• The value that estimation techniques, like planning poker, can have on helping developers understand the requirements.
• Difficulties co-ordinating and communicating changes across multiple work streams so that everyone understands changes to processes, requirements, data models or APIS that might affect their work.
• How solution architects can play a role in communicating changes across work streams.
• Andrew's growing enthusiasm for change management, Prosci training and certification, and the positive impact that professional change management has on business application adoption.

RESOURCES

• Dani Kahil on LinkedIn
• Dani Kahil's blog
• Dani Kahil's Functional Consulting online training course - Requirements analysis for a successful project delivery for Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform
• Andrew Bibby on LinkedIn
• Andrew Bibby on Twitter
• Proximo 3 website
• Prosci change management training

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