Your ERP Project Is Falling Behind. Is Lack of Leadership to Blame?

When a major technology initiative starts losing momentum, sometimes it has little to do with the technology itself.

In the first Insight in this series, we explored how technology leadership gaps can emerge even when there isn’t a vacancy on your team. We’ve also looked at what happens when a CIO retires.

ERP modernization presents another kind of leadership challenge. An institution can have a capable IT team, experienced implementation partner, and well-defined technology roadmap — and still find a major ERP initiative stalling out.

Deadlines begin to slip. Decisions take longer. Competing priorities emerge, and scope starts to creep. At that point, it can be tempting to assume the project has a technology problem. But sometimes, what the project really needs is leadership.

ERP Modernization Is More Than a Technology Project

An ERP touches nearly every corner of an institution: from finance and human resources to student services and academic operations.

That means decisions made during an ERP initiative affect how people work, how departments interact, how information moves across the institution, and how effectively the institution can operate for years to come.

Technology teams may manage the implementation, but they can’t make every institutional decision themselves. Someone needs to connect the project to the bigger picture by asking the hard questions, like:

• Which processes should change rather than simply be recreated?
• Who has authority when departments disagree?
• Which decisions require executive involvement?
• And how do we keep the project aligned with institutional priorities when circumstances change?

To be clear, these are all leadership questions.

When Projects Fall Behind, Look Beyond the Timeline

Sometimes a project is delayed because of technical complexity. But sometimes the underlying issue is that decisions aren’t being made quickly enough, ownership isn’t clear, stakeholders aren’t aligned, or an already-busy IT organization is being asked to manage both day-to-day operations and a major institutional transformation.

Adding another technical resource won’t necessarily solve those problems. The project may need someone with the authority, experience, and perspective to move decisions forward.

Executive Leadership Creates Clarity

When an ERP initiative begins to lose momentum, experienced executive technology leadership can provide something that’s difficult to capture on a project plan: clarity around priorities, decision-making, accountability, and what needs executive attention.

An experienced technology leader can work across the institution to align stakeholders, escalate decisions when necessary, identify risks before they become larger problems, and keep the initiative connected to the outcomes the institution originally set out to achieve.

Sometimes the Hardest Decision Is What Not to Do

ERP modernization creates an opportunity to rethink how an institution operates. It can also create an enormous wish list.

As projects progress, new requests emerge; departments see possibilities they hadn’t previously considered; integrations multiply; and expectations grow. Without strong governance, modernization can gradually become an attempt to solve everything at once.

Sometimes moving a project forward requires adding something. Other times it requires having the confidence to say no.

Your IT Team May Not Be the Problem

When an ERP initiative struggles, it’s easy for attention to turn toward the people managing it. But a delayed project doesn’t necessarily mean the institution has the wrong team.

In many cases, the opposite is true.

The same people leading the ERP initiative may also be responsible for keeping critical systems running, supporting users, managing vendors, protecting the institution from cybersecurity threats, responding to leadership requests, and handling dozens of other technology priorities.

They may not need to be replaced. They may need executive support around them.

Don’t Wait Until the Project Is in Crisis

Institutions don’t need to wait for an ERP implementation to fail before addressing a leadership gap.

ERP modernization is one of the largest and most consequential technology initiatives many institutions will undertake. Getting it right requires leadership that can see beyond individual workstreams, understand both technology and the institution, bring competing priorities together, and help the institution remember why it began the transformation in the first place.

SIG offers Executive Technology Leadership services that connect experienced interim CIOs with the teams that need them most. Reach out to start a conversation about how we can help.