Project Management

The Secret Sauce: Data

You may have heard the old adage about x% (scary, big number) of ERP Implementation projects failing and admittedly, they’re no small undertaking. At the same time, if your experience is anything like mine, you’ve probably come across a project manager or two who didn’t seem to deserve their seat at the table. Particularly in the age of AI, having a human whose sole focus is taking notes and playing calendar Tetris seems unnecessary at best.

Then of course there are the exceptions - those rare project managers who never seem to sleep that truly keep everyone informed with the right information at just the right moment, communicate with impeccable clarity, and hold disparate teams with varying incentives in perfect alignment throughout the engagement. I’ve been lucky enough to see a few of these people in action and done my best to replicate them, but the truth is, it’s nearly impossible to do so and even harder to hire for. So with a background in systems, it seemed only logical that the best path to repeatable success was to remove the human element completely.

Of course there are great people behind every great project, but our approach is to find the best consultants that we can and let them focus on consulting, not status reporting. Instead of relying on a high-level, qualitative red/yellow/green, we simply ask the data. An implementation project is simply a series of tasks which need to be completed, so we simply track all of the details of project as explicit items - the business requirements, the data migration templates, the action items, the test cases and results, etc. - that each have their own status and then roll-up the numbers. No more guesswork. No more reliance on the perfect PM. No more bias of rose-colored glasses. Just the numbers.

“What get’s measured get’s done.”