Four Questions Every Project Sponsor Is Asking Wrong Most project sponsors think they're doing their job well. They track the budget. They chase the timeline. They ask hard questions at steering committee. They read every status report before it's presented. None of...
The Story Sounds Right. That's the Problem. Narratives are great. We feel connected to them, we relate, we draw a conclusion, and we move on. That's the whole appeal — a good story lets you stop thinking. It's also why sponsors get blindsided. You are not paid to feel...
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...