There is nothing else that will make the implementation more successful, nor give you a happier client than the proper use of the word NO.

Generally one of the golden rules of sales is “The Customer Is Always Right”. Well in the ERP world, that just isn’t true. Of course as Dynamics NAV Consultant, you arrive on the scene after the sales process. So you have some work to do. When you get assigned to a Navision project, the first thing you must do, is go through all the paperwork, and review all the promises that the sales person made, and then get out a big NO from your tool box, and start using it.

All too often, one or two yes’s sneak through the early project phases, and yes’s are like rabbits, they bread like crazy. At first it all sounds great and happy, but a month or two down the line when you are trying to work around all these promises, you will realize that it would have been better to have been up front at the beginning. You will read some humorous statements like “We want to use pop-up to speed up data entry and make it more accurate”. As a consultant you know that pop-ups make data entry much slower, and reduce accuracy, so say NO now, don’t wait till the customer is live six months and then finds all the data errors.

David Singleton