Critical Failure Factors in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Projects
InfoSENTRY
President, Glenn Newkirk, presents at CA School Business Officials Conference
SAN DIEGO, California—Glenn Newkirk, President of InfoSENTRY Services, addressed the California Association of School Business Officials (CASBO) 76th Annual conference in San Diego on April 26. Newkirk’s presentation was on, “Critical Failure Factors in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Projects: Unleashing the Power of Negative Thinking to Increase the Potential of Project Success.”
Citing the Standish Group’s latest research*, Newkirk wryly noted that in 2002, only 34% of IT projects completed were on time, on budget, and delivering the functionality required; 51% of IT project were “challenged”—meaning that they were not on time, not on budget, or not delivering the functionality required; and 15% of IT project failed or were abandoned.”
Noting that Critical Success Factors were almost always identified in the plans of failed and “challenged” ERP projects, Newkirk smiled and said,” If Critical Success Factors are involved in over 50% of projects that fail or become challenged, then to increase your likelihood of success, you should focus instead on Critical Failure Factors in your Enterprise Resource Planning Project.” Using CCFs, organizations measure whether they are devoting sufficient resources to things that will promote failure of their ERP projects—thereby improving their odds of success.
Among the 12 Critical Failure Factors Newkirk mentioned were: (a) Keep communication to stakeholders about the ERP project’s status and issues to a minimum. Too much knowledge about the project will confuse them and lead to untidy questions. (b) Don’t establish criteria and time for ERP user acceptance testing…especially for tests tied to your requirements. Trust your implementation Partner to administer tests to make sure the system meets best practices. and (c) Do not include independent Quality Assurance reviews in your ERP project. It upsets your implementation Partners and adds to project costs not going directly to your Partners.
“Of course,“ Newkirk concluded, ”You should use Critical Success Factors, establish those Critical Success Factors early in the Enterprise Resource Planning project, constantly review them, and measure the resources you are actually devoting to them.”
InfoSENTRY Services, Inc. was founded in 1994 as an IT consulting and project management firm with a special expertise in project quality assurance, project management, project recovery, information security and disaster recovery. InfoSENTRY has no financial relationships or business partnerships with hardware, software, or consulting firms, allowing it a unique independent perspective to evaluate and manage information technology projects. More information about InfoSENTRY can be found on the web at www.infosentry.com .
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