How to decide between a big bang / waterfall or a phased approach to your Dynamics 365 project

Should you choose a big bang or a phased approach to your Dynamics 365 project? This is a hotly debated topic – even today when “Agile rules”.  This is not as straightforward as it might seem.

Typical responses from implementation project leaders are:

• Depends on the customer
• I prefer....

I feel that all of these answers are partially incorrect, and it really depends on what the customer needs delivering in this project.

The key to deciding whether big bang or a phased approach works better for you is knowing how the functionality works - for your users.

Each delivered 'chunk' of functionality should leave the users, as a minimum, no worse off than previously. This sounds obvious. However, when the project is run by people with little understanding of your business, your users and how they work, there is definitely a risk of rolling out functionality that requires that the users jump through hoops to perform their role. This is a fast track to user un-adoption and hence to project failure.

If you are able to carve up all functionality that you intend to deliver into chunks, each chunk of which adds value, and leaves no users worse off than previously, then a phased approach is probably best. If this is not possible, then you are probably better with a big bang approach. The smaller the project, the more likely that big bang is appropriate.

However, even with a big bang approach to go-live, the project will be phased, and users should be involved well before the final go-live.

Where does agile fit into this?

So, where does agile fit into this? Perhaps surprisingly, agile can be part of either approach. This might sound contrarian – let me explain. Agile really refers to how we accept new pieces of functionality into the project to work on them, whereas Big Bang or Phased refer to how we go live with the functionality as seen from the user perspective. So, we could easily have a big bang approach, comprised of several sprints.

The risks of either approach

The major risk of a big bang project is the time before going live with anything to show for the project with a concomitant fear of paying a lot of money for very little.
Conversely, a phased project can feel eternal.

Three steps to achieve your best approach

The three steps to identify where on the big bang to phased approach your project sits best are:

Identify your current state, including the processes and data that need to move to the new solution. This should include the challenges with each process and data source. The challenges will form the foundation of your business case for the project.

Work out the future end state – for these processes and data

Plot a map showing how you will get from your current state to the future state. This map should show the functionality against time.

If the map divides into two or more chunks without leaving any users worse off than previously, then a phased approach will work well. If this is not possible, then you are probably better going with a big bang approach.

It is highly likely that completing this exercise will require education around the potential offered by your selected technology.

One of the biggest project derailers that I have seen in my thirty years consulting helping organisations get this right, is where the organisation allows a divide to open up between the people with the technical skills and those with business knowledge.

While the customer is not always right – this will be subject of a future blog – the technical experts will be the team actually doing much of the implementation, so they do hold a number of trump cards.

Education, which gives the business leaders understanding of the technology, and the technology experts knowledge of the business, what it does and how it functions is the bridge across this divide.