Why ERP projects get delayed?

I was about to put the header as `why ERP projects fail?’, but decided to be positive. We have seen projects that get delayed with surprises and/or stopped abruptly. This article shares some experiences and your comments are requested.

Ownership: Is this IT-project or business-project? It’s the company’s money but who gets the budget decides the control on the project. Is this corporate driven or division driven? When the corporate decides to spend the money but ultimately gets allocated to the division’s balance sheet, conflicts start on the best way of utilizing the budget. These dynamics play critical role in the success of the project.

System/solution architecture: There are projects without the architecture framework. This is very critical if there are multiple software systems that need to ‘talk’ to each other. I have been in a project with 5 month’s total timeline where 37 dynamic interfaces are involved. Clearly, the design of the interfaces itself was not ready at that time frame period. Questions like where we will keep all transaction documentations, how reports will be executed, what type of workflow tools are needed – come up after user-testing and few days before go-live!

Power-users: There is power and political structure in every department. If the power-users are not involved at the right stages, surprises will come up and that may put a hard-stop to a project schedule. This includes Union representatives in organized manufacturing environment, where trade or other negotiations can get bundled with the ERP implementation. Similar story with key client-facing documentation like sales acknowledgement, sales invoice, purchase order and quality certifications. If these formats didn’t get tested multiple times, last minute delays happen for want of user’s approvals.

Project Managers: They bring their own dynamics into the picture. Some of them are very detail oriented but lose the big picture. Some are bean-counters and can’t handle the business user interactions. It does take years of experience and exposure to balance their tasks. They have to be good-listeners and not just good power point presenters! I have seen projects where power users dictate to have all user-level documentation ready before few days of going live. That effort distracts data conversions and ultimately more time spent on fixing data after go-live.

Focus and Priority: All departmental heads showing up to the kick-off meeting and then delegate all the work to another level. At the end of the project, they will come back again to ask all the questions. The company believes in multi-tasking and bring multiple projects like CRM, ERP, Agile software install or upgrades all together. And add events like ISO training, external audits into the same project schedule involving the same resources. On key events like ERP training, the user picks another alternative event thinking the training can be skipped. The catch-up opportunity never arises later and that results into lot of production issues. Another typical tell-tale is on the accounting analysts – they can’t be interrupted on month-close, auditing times and when the auditors are in the campus! If the production folks can’t be disturbed on the last week of the month and accounting on first week of the month, that takes 50% of the month off for any project related work. This is especially critical if both need to be in the same room.

______________________________________________________________________

Matt Ravikumar work as a JDE functional consultant in the ERP sector. His works are available in www.mattravikumar.com and in www.cartooncartons.com. His recent published books are available in Amazon under author search, Matt Ravikumar.