ERP War Stories: The Wrong Project Team Members Involved in the Design Phase of the Implementation

These ERP war stories are based on over the past 20+ years of managing ERP implementations.

We have seen common challenges relating to the structure of the project team and their roles during the implementation lifecycle.

Situation:

ERP projects typically involve four primary user groups:

• Project Sponsor – Responsible for oversight of all the functional requirements and ensuring the system design aligns with business vision within all areas of the organization.
• Project Team Leads – Responsible for defining high-level functional requirements and ensuring the system design aligns with business objectives within their area.
• SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) – Have deep operational knowledge and expertise and supports the Project Team Lead in various phases of the project.
• End Users – People who will ultimately use the system in their day-to-day roles once the solution is deployed.

On one ERP implementation we observed a common governance issue during the design phase. Departmental leads had limited availability, and because of that several system design workshops were attended primarily by SMEs.

The SMEs participating in the sessions were highly knowledgeable about their daily tasks but naturally focused on replicating existing processes exactly as they were performed in the legacy system. As a result, several design decisions were made around transaction workflows, approval steps, and reporting structures that optimized individual tasks rather than supporting the broader business objectives.

When the Project Team Leads later reviewed the configuration during testing, they identified that the system design did not align with the intended future-state operating model. Certain approval hierarchies conflicted with management controls, reporting structures did not support consolidated financial visibility, and some workflows introduced unnecessary manual steps that leadership had intended to eliminate.

This required revisiting several configuration decisions and redesigning portions of the workflow to align with the organization’s strategic goals.

Notable Risk:

When the wrong project team members are involved during the design phase, it can introduce several risks, including misalignment with the organization’s intended outcomes, inefficient or incorrect processes, and a lack of streamlined business workflows. These design decisions carry through to the system build, testing, and user acceptance phases. If issues are only identified during user acceptance testing, it often requires rework across earlier stages, resulting in increased project costs, delays, and disruption to the overall project timeline.

Mitigation:

To address this, the project governance structure was reinforced, and the roles of each user group were clarified. Design workshops were restructured to ensure that Project Team Leads and or the Project Sponsor were present during key system design decisions. The SMEs continued to be involved as needed, and minute notes were created and released to the Project Leads and Sponsor(s) for their final approval.

The above approach still allowed the SMEs to continue to provide detailed operational insight, while end users participated in later phases such as conference room pilots and user acceptance testing where their feedback on usability and day-to-day processes were most valuable.

By re-establishing the proper decision-making hierarchy and aligning participation with the appropriate phase of the implementation, the project team was able to realign the system design with the organization’s strategic objectives while still incorporating practical operational feedback.

Lessons Learned:

ERP success depends on having the right people involved at the right time and in the right capacity. When project governance clearly defines roles and responsibilities across sponsors, leadership, SMEs, and end users, system design becomes more aligned with business objectives and the path to adoption becomes much smoother.