After more than twenty years leading ERP delivery, the failures rarely surprise me any more. They are not bad luck. They are the same handful of patterns, repeating — and almost none of them are really about the software.
By Dan Johnson, founder of Cedar Ridge
A CEO or managing director might lead one ERP programme in their whole career. The vendors and partners on the other side of the table do it every week. That asymmetry of experience is the quiet reason so many of these investments disappoint.
The good news is that a pattern you can name is a pattern you can prevent. Here are the seven I see most often — and what it takes to avoid each one.
The vendor owns their software. The implementation partner owns their statement of work. The internal project manager owns the plan. And yet, when you ask the simple question — who is accountable for this actually making the business better? — the room goes quiet.
Every party is doing their job. The problem is that no single person is accountable for the result the business was promised. That gap is where good projects quietly drift into disappointing ones.
I have watched businesses run a tidy, well-documented selection process and still choose the wrong platform. Not because they were careless — because the requirements underneath were never properly understood.
A demo flatters. A salesperson reassures. And a decision gets made on how the software looks rather than how the business actually needs to run. The cost of that mistake does not show up for another eighteen months.
New software dropped on top of broken or undocumented processes does not fix them. It simply makes the mess run faster, and now it is harder to see.
The uncomfortable work — agreeing how the business should actually operate before configuring anything — is the work that gets skipped when everyone is keen to “get on with it”.
Timelines and budgets are often set to be attractive, not accurate. Everyone in the room half-knows it, and everyone hopes it will be fine.
It rarely is. The gap between the optimistic plan and the real work surfaces later — usually at the worst possible moment, with the least room to respond.
Data migration is treated as a technical task for the end of the project. Then, weeks before go-live, the true state of the data becomes clear — and it is worse than anyone admitted.
Cleaning it under time pressure is expensive, stressful, and a common reason go-live dates slip or launches go ahead on shaky foundations.
When time runs short — and it always does — the parts of the project that protect you are the first to be compressed. Testing is shortened. Cutover is rushed. Contingency evaporates.
These are precisely the activities that stand between you and a painful first month live. Protecting them is a leadership decision, not a technical one.
Even a well-built system fails if it lands into teams who were never genuinely prepared to use it. Training happens too late, communication is thin, and the people expected to change their daily work were never brought along.
Adoption stalls, the old workarounds creep back, and the investment never delivers what it promised — not because the software was wrong, but because the change was never led.
Read them again and one thing stands out: not one of these is a technical failure. They are decisions — made, missed or postponed — by people under pressure who had never been here before.
That is exactly where independent leadership earns its place: someone in the room whose only job is to protect your investment.
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