There is no argument that an ERP implementation project is a project, and (somehow) should be managed as one. There is very little argument that implementation providers should manage the day to day efforts of their own people from within projects that their own organizations manage. But often there is a failure by the company with the most at stake – the company buying the system – to manage (and understand why it should manage) the overall implementation effort (including the implementation partner’s sub-project) as a single project that it controls. When the company buying the system drops this ball, vendors don’t give up and go home: they move in to take control of the implementation in the only ways they can.
What will implementation vendors agree to, and when will they agree to it?
They will agree to just about any performance objective that they get to bid on, and that they believe they can achieve, but only before coming to terms; after an implementation project is contracted (and especially after work has actually begun) they will (rightly, in our view) perceive as intolerable interference any effort on the part of the buyer to direct activities and impose conditions of success. This is why every concrete expectation of the buying company should be expressed in detailed, unambiguous business terms in the form of a negotiated statement of work (SOW) that the implementation partner (1) participates in creating (an acquisition phase activity), (2) uses as the basis of their own quote and project plan and (3) agrees to be contractually bound by.
Vendors will agree to this – if it is declared up front as a requirement (to every potential vendor) for earning the business – because it protects them as much as it protects their clients. It protects them because it spells out (1) the precise definition of success and (2) the buyer’s commitments, especially in terms of (a) resources to be provided by the buyer and (b) the buyer’s obligations to pay for services received. Most of all, it relieves vendors of a responsibility that they don’t really want: the responsibility to decide how their client is going to do business, day to day. But vendors will only relinquish this responsibility when they recognize that their clients have firmly picked it up, and only require the vendor to meet precise targets that it agreed to meet before the deal was struck.
