The previous part in this blog should have made us aware, that many procedures are required to manage all these steps.

To review your status let me ask you a question:

What is your Customization Strategy?

Your answer might be something like, 'customization strategy, well, we have standards and we let requirement documents approve'.

Let me ask you another question:

How long does it take to redeploy all your customizations into a fresh installation?

In 90% of all installations the answer to this question would be: we can't!

Although no one would have to do it (hopefully), just thinking about it and recognizing that we have today too many manual steps involved, different procedures and sometimes (undocumented) manual steps to complete a customization installation. And ... in general too many customizations.

Why is working with customizations often so complicated and time consuming?

Here are the key reasons as I have identified them in my projects:

• Customization standards defined, but not maintained
• Different knowledge on developer side (results getting an individual developer touch)
• No need to automate deployment (not forced by client)
• Different documentation styles, not easy to hand over to someone else
• Different development concepts, difficult for the maintenance
• Just the minimum present for testing, often positive testing only
• Deviations from naming conventions accepted, although defined
• Complicated procedures, therefore sometimes partially ignored
• And last but not least, hand made version control (still)
  

If you would have to 'redeploy all your customizations' you would have to

• Follow all your own standards and best practice
• Track deviations and define corrective tasks
• Automate as much as possible, minimize manual tasks
• Do not allow any change coming in without version control
• Utilize products to support you in deployment
• Minimize hand made scripts and extensive documentation
• Review regularly used techniques to guarantee that all are in line with the current release and also easy maintainable
• Create solution libraries and force the team to contribute and reuse
• Define quality activities and execute them
• Define a procedure to release customizations
  

I know, it is easy to write down, but much harder to manage. Will provide some guidelines in my next blog.

Volker