Dynamics AX War Stories by Andre

What do developers love most? Writing code of course! And what if you are a passionate AX developer, working on AX 2009 and are going to be part of an AX 2012 upgrade? Well, jumping into AX 2012 as soon as possible! So, it was my job to be the boring PM that had to explain that no one was to start coding anything until the boring analysis phase was completed. And I was right! Critical success factor alert - Make sure your team (both technical and functional) understand the target version as well as the current version so they can make the right decisions for your upgrade. For a few weeks, our technical team was divided into areas of interest in the system, and had the tasks to study the AX 2012 documentation, play with the AX 2012 sandbox to get to understand what we were dealing with. None of our team had expertise in AX 2012 really, we were really early adopters! For every key area, both functional and technical team members had to develop a document that would describe the ...

Before I dive into the plan details, I would like to remind you that the exercise of developing the plan is what really is critical to your success. So my plan may not work for you verbatim! You have to go through this process yourself :) Ok, enough with the caveat, here we go, below is the expanded section for the planning phase of the upgrade project plan: The first artifact I developed was our project charter, or the first draft of it. In it I included the project goals and objectives, guiding principles, team stakeholders, high level roadmap, key activities and what is in and what is out of scope. For example, for us, process redesign was out of scope, our upgrade was "apples to apples". Key for me was to keep this as a one pager. Something I could give as a handout to a new tea member or an interested stakeholder. Here it is, I blanked out the team members to maintain their anonymity: I will write about building our team in a fu...

So I was appointed to take on the task of upgrading our AX 2009 system to AX 2012. I was new to AX but experienced as a developer, architect and then project and program manager in my career. So I had to do a lot of research, but I struggled to understand how big was this project? How many people will be needed? What are the types of skillsets needed? Is this a purely technical exercise? What is the optimal sequencing of tasks? The research did not provide the answers I needed, I found a lot of technical material on how to do upgrades, white papers etc. But not much else. I did find Sure Step, but it did not provide me much either, although I used the Sure Step phases and color scheme on my project plan which I will share with you. I thought that would make it easier for AX resources to get used to, it did kind of do the trick. Here we go, below is the collapsed view of my AX 2012 upgrade project plan after 12 or 13 iterations in terms of task sequencing and task estimated duration...