THE TRANSFORMATION IN TROUBLE

Your ERP programme is over budget, behind schedule, or both. Your internal PM is not pushing back against the implementation partner. Meetings have become status updates disguised as governance. Nobody is making decisions. You are starting to worry this is the one that damages your reputation.

You need someone who will tell you the truth and get it across the line.

THE COMPANY THAT HAS OUTGROWN ITS SYSTEMS

You have grown through acquisition. You have 5, 10, maybe 23 different systems that do not talk to each other. Reports take a week because someone in head office has to manually reconcile data from multiple platforms. You know you need to consolidate. The thought of it terrifies you.

You need someone who has done exactly this before.

THE FIRST-TIMER

You have never had an ERP system. You run on spreadsheets and you know it cannot continue. But you do not know what you need, who to trust, or how to evaluate what vendors are selling you. Every demo has bells and whistles and you cannot tell what matters.

You need someone who will define the requirements, lock the scope, and protect you from your own enthusiasm.

THE COMPANY THAT HAS BEEN BURNED

Your last implementation failed. Or half-succeeded, which is worse. You have an expensive system nobody uses properly. Users went back to spreadsheets within a week. The partner says it was a change management issue. You suspect that is not the whole truth.

You need someone to diagnose what actually went wrong and fix it.

READ THE ROOM, NOT THE BRIEF.

I do not start with your requirements document. I start with your people. Who is delivering, who is talking, who is hiding, who is drowning. The brief tells me what you think the problem is. The room tells me what it actually is.

DISPROVE, DO NOT PROVE.

Trained in police intelligence, I do not try to confirm the obvious theory. I try to break it. I look for every reason the answer might be wrong. Whatever survives that process is the real problem.

PEOPLE FIRST. THEN PROCESS. THEN SYSTEM.

Every failed ERP implementation I have seen failed because someone got the order wrong. They bought the system first, hoped the processes would follow, and forgot the people entirely. I never make that mistake.

SCOPE IS SACRED.

Once scope is locked, it is locked. I do not let scope creep kill a programme by a thousand small additions that each seemed reasonable at the time. If something genuinely changes, it goes through governance. Impact assessed. Decision made. No drift.

RIGHT FIRST TIME.

You get one chance to land a go-live. If users do not trust the system on day one, they will be back on their spreadsheets by day two. I plan cutover like it matters, because it does.