A ERP project’s success or failure is defined by the joint effort of two forces: a vendor’s implementation team and support provided by client’s employees.  ERP vendors and their implementation partners cannot operate in void. Clients must support the implementation by organizing their internal staff, providing timely information and supporting implementation efforts along the way. Without necessary support from the client the project is likely to go down the wrong path even if the implementation team performs their tasks flawlessly.

While competent implementation PMs will certainly guide the team towards the right direction, they would usually have very little leverage over or oversight of the internal situation at the client end.  As such, situations with clients causing delays on the project, which inevitably translates in greater implementation costs and dissatisfaction with the implementation partner, are not uncommon.

In most cases, ERP clients may not have sufficient in-house expertise to run an ERP project. Trusted functional leads with no prior IT project management knowledge would be assigned to lead the initiative, just to find themselves swamped with tasks and issues they have no prior experience dealing with.  In other instances, clients would have sufficient technical and functional resources to project-manage the implementation internally.  However, their ERP implementation experience would be limited, and despite their technical knowledge, they may struggle to go through their first ERP implementation in many years.

The issue of in-house expertise and experience is often compounded by commitments that the assignees may have.  Internal resources assigned to the ERP project may quickly discover that they still have their “real job” to take care of, and gradually, their time and effort commitment to the project will fizzle, which will inevitably impact the overall project.

3PM Consulting Group offers our expertise in project management from the client side.  Our services differ from the implementation project management – instead of leading a technical team, which is done by the EPR vendor or partner, we help with organizing client resources.   And while intangible benefits of our work are vast, the quantifiable element of our involvement is unmistakable:

 

We help to ensure project success through the efficient organization and allocation of your resources.