Ideally the total volume of work can be uniformly distributed for all project’s duration though in praxis the curve representing the effort has the form of a wave or aggregation of waves that tend to reach the peak shortly before or during the Go-Live(s). More important, higher fluctuations occur in the various areas of the project on whole project’s duration, as there are dependencies between the various functional areas, as one needs to wait for decisions to be made, people are not available, etc. Typically, the time wasted on waiting, researching or other non-value-added activities have the potential of leading to such peaks. Therefore, the knowledge must be available, and decisions must be taken when required, which can be challenging but not impossible to achieve.
To bridge the time wasted on waiting, the team members need to work on other topics. If on customer’s side the resources can handle maybe other activities, on vendor’s side the costs can be high and proportional with the volume of waiting. Therefore, vendor’s resources must be involved at least in two projects or do work in other areas in advance, which is not always possible. However, when vendor’s resources are involved in two or more projects, unless the planning is perfect or each resource can handle the work as it comes, there are further waiting times added. The customer is then forced either to book the resources exclusively, or to wait and carry the costs associated with it.
On the other side ERP Implementations tend to become exploration projects, especially when the team has only partial knowledge about the system, or the requirements have a certain degree of specialization that deviates from the standard processes. The more unknowns an ERP implementation has, the more difficult is to plan. To be able to plan one must know the activities ahead, how long they take, and of course, one must adhere to the delivery dates, because each delay can have a cascading effect that can impact project’s schedule considerably.
Probably the best approach to planning is to group the activities into packages and plan the packages, being in each subteam’s duty to handle the planning for each package, following to manage at upper level only the open issues, risks or opportunities. This shifts the burden from Project Manager’s shoulders within the project. Moreover, even if in theory the plan can consider each activity, it will become obsolete as soon it’s updated given the considerable volume of work requested to maintain it. Periodically, one can still revise the whole plan to identify opportunities and risks. What the team can do is to plan for a certain time interval (e.g. 4-6 weeks) and build from there. This allows focusing on the most important activities.
To further shift the burden, activities like Data Migration, Data Cleaning or the integrations with third party systems should be treated when possible as subprojects. Despite having interdependencies with the main project (e.g. parameters, master data, decisions) and share same resources, they have their own schedule whose deadlines need to be aligned with main project’s milestones.
Unless the team and business put all effort to respect the plan and, as long the plan is realistic, the initial plan can seldom be respected – it’s anyway just a sketch of the road ahead that can change as the project progresses – and this aspect needs to be understood by the business otherwise will lead to false expectations. On the other side, the team must try respecting the deadlines and communicate in time inability to do so. It’s an interplay in which communication is more important than ever.
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