Companies usually lose control of a project at its very beginning. A company most often loses control of their project in the belief that a software vendor or a hired project management consultant knows (or should know) their business better than they do.
Solution providers, usually software vendors, take control of the buying process by guiding their prospect toward the solutions within their software that they believe solves the prospects current and future business requirements which is based on their experience with similar companies. A company usually loses control of the buying process by submitting a list of requirements to a solution provider based on what the users of their current system believe are the requirements for a new business software system.
In the case of consultants, through no fault of theirs, the control of an ERP acquisition and/or implementation project is lost when the consultant interviews the CIO or IT Director, Executives and users to understand what they feel are the requirements necessary for a new business system. The consultant then imposes his or her experiences with companies like yours (but not yours) and the successes they might have had with these like companies and then attempts to map those requirements to their experience to determine what business software systems should be evaluated by your company. This process usually results in the consultant telling the company’s management team what it already knew. This can be helpful in some cases but doesn’t usually address where the business is today, where it wants to go, and how it will get there.
If a company hopes to maintain control of a project its leadership team must take the time to define its future business objectives, which should be the most compelling reason to replace its current business system. These objectives are discovered by asking the following questions; where are we at today, where do we want to go, and how will we get there? The answers to these questions become the functionality that will be required in a new business system: they define exactly how the company will achieve its business goals.
