Factors which influence the success of ERP project implementation - Part 2.

The post is continuation of my earlier post (Part 1) on the same subject The first 3 factors are can be considered as Phase1, the below mentioned factors can be towards Phase 2.

‘One Team’: Once it’s decided to go in for ERP, the next step is to have a steering committee, which will play an important role to tracking the project towards successful implementation of ERP system and proactively address risks. Ideally, the steering committee should have proper representation from management, different vendors associated with project. An ERP project can have different vendors like,
• Hardware
• Servers
• Operating systems
• Networks
• Software Licensing , consulting or IT service for implementation, training and support.

It would be a good option to have a project management office, which would look into day to day coordination reporting into the steering committee. Each of these tasks performed by vendors has dependency on start on the other vendor. Hence, PMO office should be proper control on all task executed by Vendors.

Schedule, Budget, Scope: From this stage of the project, Project management plays important role in success of the project. Budgeting would have been preliminarily done at the “Phase 1” of the project, but these would be more of ball park number (Variation of 20 to 25%). At this stage, more accurate estimate needs to be worked out.

ERP implementation has other stream as well, which has dependency in successful implementation of the project. Project management tools/ software can be used to track some of the key project related parameters.

Project deliverables, sign off and change requests: The project as such can have broken down into different phase with a work break down structure (WBS) with deliverables defined for each milestone or phase, the sign off and change request procedure agreed with all stakeholders. This should be brought about by the PMO team and agreed with ‘Steering Committee’ Till about phase 2, it’s more of setting up the ground rules towards successful execution of the project. All these might take considerable amount of time. The next phase is the actual execution phase of the project, on which I will continue further shortly.

Till then, happy reading.