How do you know if your ERP project has gotten off track? Pinpointing the root cause might be challenging, but the symptoms are usually clear: confused stakeholders, sidetracked teams, repeated delays, and inflated budgets. We hope you walk away from this article—your pit stop—with improved mechanics for driving success.
ERP projects can easily fall apart, particularly amid system implementations or upgrades. They can consume your people, budget, time, and rob you of the opportunity to focus on business growth. If you’ve succeeded on your first try, congratulations! You have accomplished an impressive and rare feat. However, if you find yourself caught in a struggling ERP initiative and this is hitting a nerve, you should know that you are not alone, the truth is necessary, and success is possible.
You are not alone. As an executive sponsor, you might be the last person to learn your project is off track. Why? Because your project leadership is either unaware of the ugly truth or not willing to share it. This makes your job nearly impossible. You hear a common refrain from project leadership: "We are behind, but we can catch up. The status report shows yellow, not red." Despite having been stuck for weeks, they assure you this is the week they will get back on track.
As is often the case in life and business, what people say is motivated by who cuts the check. Internal project leadership is often motivated by those to whom they report, and no one wants to be on the team that takes the blame. Complicating matters even more are performance reviews and bonuses, which may offer greater rewards for staying the course than telling the truth. So they don’t share the truth fast enough, hoping to soon catch up. Your integrator, much like project leadership, is often motivated by contract terms. So they claim things are on track and try to redirect attention elsewhere. At this point, you might see a trend developing about the hidden, ugly truth.
The truth is necessary. In many cases, the person equipped to put your project back on track is an experienced, independent leader. This person’s job is to protect your budget, timeline, and resources by:
This independent leader must be given the ultimate project leadership position and report directly to the steering committee. If you have ever seen a large project fail two or three times before succeeding, it’s likely that the leader who carried the baton over the finish line played a critical role. They also likely gave the executives the truth and facts needed to make difficult scoping and resourcing decisions. The mantra, “We just worked harder,” was probably not the secret to success.
The integrator and your internal project leadership may push back on this prescription, because an independent leader takes away their ability to manipulate the truth and makes them more accountable than ever. But if you pull together and confront the ugly truth, it can lead to a career-defining win for everyone involved.
Success is possible. Your people, budget, time, and opportunity to focus on business growth may all rely on taking a strong stance and embracing a new direction. But remember, success is possible. We have seen this approach to ERP projects save millions of dollars and drive great success.
Let’s assume you have reached the truth. Now you have work to do, and it’s essential to focus your energy on the most important work first to establish the path to success. Defining the essential deliverables and standards will be the foundation of your entire project. If this sounds like the point at which you are stuck or a step your team bypassed, we encourage you to take time to do this right, either at the beginning or as a reset. It will save you time and money and directly impact results.
Chart the real critical path. There are excellent courses that define a “critical path,” as well as tools that enable a critical path to be input and monitored. Both are great options. However, at some point, you need to be able to discuss the real critical path at an executive or board level. We suggest creating three critical path perspectives—technology, process, and people—and then showing how they integrate into one project-wide path. This will help you establish focus, staffing, and communication and prevent vital deliverables from becoming afterthoughts. The real critical path drives attention and visibility, providing relevant information for the steering committee, executive sponsor, and board.
Make decisions that stick. There will always be significant decisions to make during a project. A critical path is navigated most efficiently by ensuring you don’t have to revisit or remake these key decisions.
If you adhere to the following, you can make decisions that stick and benefit the entire project:
Be meticulous with the deliverables that matter most. In a 280-character-limit world, creating thorough documentation and meticulous records is becoming a lost art. Here’s a simple example of a sequential structure of interdependent deliverables:
Requirements -> Future Processes -> Test Cases/Scripts -> Training Materials
If the team shortcuts the requirements, you will miss some of the processes. Resulting will be incomplete testing and training that falls short. This can snowball into project delays, budget overruns, or post-go-live problems.
Maintain quality control on the deliverables that matter most and establish critical completion points before moving on. Take time to ensure standards and templates are in place so no matter how many people are involved, they will produce common results with excellence.
Does your team understand the business reasons for your ERP project? The fundamental question, “Why are we doing this?” too frequently gets lost in the shuffle of a large-scale project. Some will answer that corporate says it’s necessary or it’s an IT upgrade. Some have no idea. By documenting the real business value, rallying your employee base and your team, and making value the core of project communications, you can create ongoing motivation and drive positive results.
Make the targeted business value clear. The following actions proactively answer the question, “Why are we doing this?”
Enlist a value champion. Most large ERP projects cost millions of dollars and have a targeted value of 3-5x the cost. Enlisting a dedicated value champion or a Value Management Office is highly recommended to ensure the target is reached. The value champion must spend time understanding the business and overall project so they can chart and navigate the path to value.
Successful navigation requires:
While project management may only report the news, leadership drives projects to success.
While execution might only entail working hard to get things done, discipline enforces quality and completion necessary for successful results.
While decision making along the way becomes blurred by noise, focusing on value enables the team to stay motivated to achieve success.
It’s easy to get caught up talking about processes, technology, data, and change. We urge you to regularly ask your team these questions so percentages and green status reports don’t cover up critical truths:
Finding the answers will be crucial to the success of your ERP project.
Trenegy helps companies get the most out of their technology. Reach out to us at info@trenegy.com.
