Peak Methodology Cliff Notes | Estes Group | Matt Thompson

by Matt Thompson | Jun 5, 2015 | Epicor, Epicor 10, ERP, ERP Consulting

Hey, everybody, Matt Thompson here with the Estes Group and going to run you through just the Cliff Notes version of what peak methodology is, how we approach it and why it’s good for projects.

So what is our approach to Peak Methodology?

It’s made up of really a best practice model that consists of three different things, number one being our methodology itself which is a five-stage methodology made up of prepare, educate, architect, validate and stabilize. It’s a hybrid methodology that brings in some traditional waterfall, breaks into some agile methodologies where we sprint things out and then we go back into that traditional waterfall for the validate and stabilize.

We also incorporate that in with a lot of fact finding and understanding that rolls into your statement of work, and we couple all of that experience that comes at you from not only years of experiences of our own folks and our own team and Estes Group itself, but also thousands and thousands of projects that are backed by Epicore and our certification that we have with them.

So how do we break that down?

Prepare, we want to establish that project scope. We want to really get the understanding of our schedule and resources on both internal and external, and all of that comes out and culminates through the project plan development. We use an online project planning tool so that you have full visibility to that any time, real time, all the time.

All of that comes out through our best practice reviews. So what we do is we engage with you guys, we come out, we take a really good look at the business, we go through some in-depth workshops and we come out of that understanding what the scope of the project needs to be, what are the key processes, the Achilles’ heels that we are going to see for your business, for your project, because every single one is different, so we attack it in that way.

Then we go into education. Key thing here, core module education. We’re level setting vocabulary. Consultants tend to speak Klingon and clients tend to have their very own language that they’d developed over the years, so we need to level set that so that we can have good, beneficial, architectural conversations coming up.

So here’s where we then break in and we do the architecture prototyping of your project, and this is where we take that spin and we go into agile. So we break that down towards nice and neat monthly springs. So every month you go through the exact same processes as you did the month prior, so you know you’re going to be launching a spring. You’re going to be working through data migration for the activities within that sprint, and you’re going to be finalizing processes by the end of the month for that sprint, and anything else that shakes out of that is coming out into a development track on the side, might need customization, custom reports, dashboards, those kinds of things, right?

So the idea here is though is it creates consistency, repeatability and a really clear understanding of exactly how you’re going to take all of those bites out of that whale of an ERP project. We document all of those results through workflow in the EUPs, so if you use Exall  and EKM, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about there for those tools. Otherwise, we have some other tools available through different Excel templates called biostream scripts  and those kinds of things and those kinds of things and then EUP templates to make sure you’re documenting every last procedure. Click here, save here, do what you need to do there and then go. Key is you’re go live ready at the end of this stage.

So then we break that down and we go into validate. We want to make sure that you’re doing a full dress rehearsal here. That includes a cutover process. That’s different than a lot of other folks in how they approach it out there, so make sure you understand how you’re going to prove that you are ready for go live and proving it is the most important step, because if you don’t and you try to just go live, never seen one of those be successful, right? So make sure you go through… you do the dress rehearsal, you know what’s going to happen and then odds are for go live day, you’re going to be really prepared for what might happen.

So when you do all that it just goes right into stabilizing. So it should be a very natural cutover and transition at that stage of the game. You have final training that needs to be caught up. You go live. You stabilize the system where we’re monitoring, we’re helping, any of the little things that pop up here and there, we’re helping troubleshoot and triage, but very typically at this stage of the game it gets to be pretty light.

So Estes Group is tailing off drastically at this stage of the game. You guys are ramping up, and you’re starting to see that ROI because money is not going out the door; you’re using the system now for good information on what you’re doing.

So with that, start a conversation with us. Love to hear from you. Love to hear what your thoughts are on the methodology and what you just saw here today. There is a longer version of this out there so if you want to hear in more detail and more of what my thoughts are on the project methodology, by all means take a look at that video, go on to our YouTube channel and you’ll be able to find that.

You’ll also find it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and start conversations with us. You can hit us up on any of those three at any point in time. I pretty well monitor them real time and as well hit us on our website. Ask an expert comes directly into my inbox. I’ll be glad to talk you with you about any of your questions you may have and then as well [email protected] is monitored by several of us here, and any one of us will be happy to get back to you as quick as we can. Thank you guys very much. Looking forward to the next one.

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