The Cost of Saving You love to save. Every sponsor does — it's part of the job, and it looks good in the minutes. But most sponsors can't actually tell you what a saving cost them. They know the number they kept. They don't know the number they gave up. Here's the...
Method to Madness Everything we do has a method attached to it. We rarely notice it, because most of the time the method is invisible — it's just "how things are done." But the method is doing all the work. It's the difference between success and failure, between...
Every ERP Program Gets a Curveball. Your Job Is to Know What Not to Lose. At kickoff, the plan looks complete. The steering committee has signed off on the business case. The Gantt chart has a go-live date circled in the last quarter of next year. There's a change...
Teamwork Is Not Motivational. It Is an Architectural Discipline. Most executives form a project team the way you'd assemble a dinner party. Get good people in the room, set a friendly tone, trust that competence and goodwill will do the rest. Then three months in, the...
The ERP Team You Need Most executives building an ERP team start with three roles in mind: a project manager, a business analyst, and someone from IT. They discover the other sixteen roles they needed somewhere around month eight — usually because a gap has already...
Go-Live Is Not a Finish Line Somewhere in every technology program, a date gets written down early, put on a slide, and repeated so many times that it stops being a plan and becomes an identity. Go-live. Everyone starts measuring themselves against it. Nobody...
Why is your project not finishing on time? Every executive who's sponsored a major project knows the moment. The steering committee pack has been green for three months. Then, somewhere around month four, the date quietly moves. Then it moves again. By the time the...
Knowledge Is Power: Why Executives Must Understand Software Implementation Before They Can Lead It As clients, we carry the ultimate responsibility for managing our software vendors. Yet most of us walk into implementation projects not knowing what it actually takes...