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...

Hi there, I would like to share with you how at my company we successfully upgraded from AX 2009 to AX 2012 by ourselves, no partner involved. It's been over a year since we went live and have upgraded to R2 and CU6 since. We are currently evaluating CU7. The main reason for starting this blog is due to 2 colleagues of mine coming back from AXUG stating how many people they met at the conference that had not upgraded yet. Maybe my story will help you on your quest to upgrade to AX 2012. There is enough material out there on best practices, technical white papers to support your upgrade etc. I do not want to refurbish those in this blog, or even list out those resources, you can do that better than me. What I want to do is give you my thinking and outcomes of our process, artifacts like our project plan and upgrade checklist, how those got developed, building the right team, testing and the change management efforts that are critical to your upgrade. I have to keep you hanging a...

Dear fellow Dynamics AX managers, this is my first blog on Dynamics AX. I do see a lot of information on the technical side, not much on the functional side, and close to nothing on the management side. I thought there may be a need for Dynamics AX project managers to share war stories, thus this new blog. I will start posting shorter blogs on different topics about how I manage Dynamics AX projects, I hope you do engage in feedback and ideas for more topics to share. Looking forward to it! Cheers, Andre