My AX 2012 Upgrade Project Plan and Roadmap
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 durations (you may want to save the image and zoom into it for a better view):
Originally, we estimated the upgrade to be 6 months, but we ended up spending 9 months. In hindsight, and with the knowledge we gained with the project, we could have done it in 6 months today. A phase not included in the initial project plan was the approach we took for testing - Parallel testing. I will write about how we did that in a future blog, but that added 3 months to our original plan.
Another curiosity was that we expected to do 3-4 "practice" upgrades, and ended up doing 9!
Using the detailed project plan, I also created a more high level upgrade roadmap to use as a communications artifact with key stakeholders, both from the business and IT:
On my next few blogs, I am going to go into more detail about each phase of the project plan.
Some context about our setup:
We use all the financial modules and have a heavily customized module to automate our accounting process on top of AR and AP. We also have an HR module with some customizations:
Originally, our AX 2009 implementation included a data migration from our legacy accounting system which was hosted in an AS400.
We have 75 users today and our database was 260GB. No international offices at this time.
At the time of the upgrade we had 4 legal entities.
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 durations (you may want to save the image and zoom into it for a better view):
Originally, we estimated the upgrade to be 6 months, but we ended up spending 9 months. In hindsight, and with the knowledge we gained with the project, we could have done it in 6 months today. A phase not included in the initial project plan was the approach we took for testing - Parallel testing. I will write about how we did that in a future blog, but that added 3 months to our original plan.
Another curiosity was that we expected to do 3-4 "practice" upgrades, and ended up doing 9!
Using the detailed project plan, I also created a more high level upgrade roadmap to use as a communications artifact with key stakeholders, both from the business and IT:
On my next few blogs, I am going to go into more detail about each phase of the project plan.
Some context about our setup:
We use all the financial modules and have a heavily customized module to automate our accounting process on top of AR and AP. We also have an HR module with some customizations:
- General Ledger
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Inventory Management
- Budgeting
- Human Resources
Originally, our AX 2009 implementation included a data migration from our legacy accounting system which was hosted in an AS400.
We have 75 users today and our database was 260GB. No international offices at this time.
At the time of the upgrade we had 4 legal entities.
Thanks for sharing experience. can you briefly explain the scope of AX 2009 which modules and how much years of data you upgraded with how much level of customization.
ReplyDeleteGood point, I'll update or add an entry with some context :)
ReplyDeleteMuhammad, I added some sizing context, hopefully that helps get a perspective of our implementation.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing! Very helpful to see some real life examples. We are embarking on a Global Upgrade from AX7 to D365. Curious to know what tools you used best to keep all Project / Process work organized but also in a way to collaborate with the stakeholders if working across different regions and ongoing process synchronization. Did you implement on a Global scale and did you have a number of integrations to also work out? Interesting to see that BPR was out of scope.
ReplyDeleteIt’s great to come across a blog every once in a while that isn’t the same out of date rehashed material. Fantastic read.
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