ERP projects do not fail suddenly.
They deteriorate quietly.
Status shifts from Green to Red in a matter of weeks, but the signals were visible long before the dashboard changed colour. Scope expanding without decision discipline. Governance forums becoming updates instead of controls. Data risks “noted” but not owned. Dependencies accepted without consequence.
Nothing is surprising. We simply tolerate ambiguity for too long.
Teams push forward to protect timelines. Activity increases. Reporting stays optimistic. No one wants to destabilise confidence. The project becomes busy — not necessarily controlled. By the time red appears, the correction window is already narrow and expensive.
In most serious investments, we build independent checks.
Financial audits. Structural inspections. Cyber penetration testing.
Yet in ERP programs — often multi-million-dollar transformations — independent assurance is treated as discretionary. A “nice to have.” Something to remove when budgets tighten.
That logic is inverted.
If you are investing $500K in an ERP implementation, allocating $50K to independent assurance is not overhead. It is capital protection. Ten percent to protect one hundred percent. That is not cost. That is governance discipline.
Independent assurance does not exist to criticise teams. It exists to expose blind spots early — when correction is still affordable. It identifies scope drift before it becomes rework. It challenges sequencing before dependencies collapse. It highlights weak decision cadence before escalation becomes political.
Most ERP projects look strong at initiation. Energy is high. Workshops are productive. Vendors are aligned.
Complexity reveals itself later — in integration friction, process ownership confusion, configuration shortcuts, and change fatigue. That is precisely when objectivity matters most.
Internal teams cannot easily self-diagnose structural weaknesses. They are immersed. They carry sunk cost. They carry reputational exposure. Optimism bias is human, not malicious.
Independent assurance provides distance.
Distance provides clarity.
Clarity preserves ROI.
There is no strategic reason to wait until go-live to discover whether your investment delivered value. Governance is not something applied at the end. It is something applied while you can still steer.
Assure early. Assure mid-stream. Correct while correction is still cheap.
