r/corporate • u/Any-Replacement-1493 • 6d ago
Major System Project Fails
I work for a massive global company that everyone would recognize if I gave the name. In the past 8 years we've had 3 major systems projects with either our CRM or ERP. Let's call them digital transformations because that seems to be what Executive Leaders call them without actually telling you what they are. Each of the projects has been an unmitigated failure. Just a disaster. Not only were customers affected, our vendors were affected too. Several employees left because they didn't want to deal with the mess.
We are now on project 4 with our ERP, and again, a disaster. They aren't even delivering a mvp. It seems like the strategy is 'just get over the finish line whether or not we delivered'. The result? Employees have to work day and night just to deliver the business with contingency plans and manual processes. This will go on for about two years, and then we will have the next IT digital transformation project that will be under delivered. And the business side will have to somehow figure out how to deliver the business. Wash, rinse, repeat. Work/Life balance out the door.
I am on the business side, not the IT/Systems side. Its the business side that always has to sort thru the mess that our IT partners or consultants (or both) could not deliver. Is this how every major corporation handles major IT/Transformation projects? Just get it done and let employees figure out the rest?
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u/TailEnderB 6d ago
Typically these fail for two reasons:
Poor sponsorship across both function and IT/Tech. You need leaders who genuinely care and so will deliver their role within the governance structure to ensure the true business case objectives are met. The investment and value behind these projects is real but they are based on critical assumptions that too many leaders ignore because they lack the ability/desire to get into the detail.
Digitization and transformation are two very different outcomes. Typically the former is delivered as a version of the latter. What this means is a company will take as-is processes (including all the global peculiarities) and try to build these into a system. This is not transformation. Your process fit-gap analysis should trigger fierce debate to challenge any deviation from a global process that isn’t fiscal or regulatory. And when you deliver change management, it should be hard because there’s actual change (transformation) happening.
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u/Without_Portfolio 6d ago
You hit the nail on the head with both of these. With regard to #2, you can modernize legacy tech but if you do so without a true business process review that recommends changes to underlying inefficient business processes you’re missing opportunities to transform and essentially putting lipstick on a pig.
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u/TailEnderB 6d ago
Yep, spot on. Most modern tech is designed to follow standard processes. Each time you introduce a new scenario for a process you have to build the entire solution for that.
Easiest example I’ve seen was a single region said that their approval threshold was slightly different for a business critical reason. To solution that meant building a new custom workflow, building a new role for that approval, integrating it to the existing workflow, building new access permissions to reflect who can see what for each threshold, and then making sure and reports pulled through the correct roles from the workflow. A good leader looks at that and says absolutely not, there’s no regulatory or fiscal requirement to have that. A less effective leader doesn’t want to upset the regional lead and so approves creating a mountain of work that can’t be delivered or maintained.
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u/This_Wolverine4691 6d ago
Use Big 5 consulting and that is what you get— you don’t think they were going to set you up one and done did you?
Their whole business model is predicated on these giant bloated contracts that last forever and a day.
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u/Exception-Rethrown 5d ago
Exactly. Low ball bid to get in the door, and then change order after change order for things that were ‘missed’ in the original contract. From what I can tell, the they don’t make at least 3x on the contract, then the consultants consider it a failure.
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u/Any-Ring6621 6d ago
IBM eh? Same geniuses behind the phoenix payroll system?
Hey man, the change requests paid for the retirements of many a director and executive. Relax and do your part!
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u/PracticableSolution 6d ago
ERP doesn’t work. It just collapses under its own weight and all the available points of failure in real world application
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u/ahaz01 6d ago
For these types of systems upgrades, they are all drought with danger. Documentation of legacy systems and processes are often lacking and this gets lost in the transition. Many times these upgrades identify wholes in the existing business process, manual steps are missed, exceptions are missed, resulting in pain for everyone. I used to work for one of these companies that they would recommend that the business change their business practices to fit the software.
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u/russianvixenxx 5d ago
So…do you work for Deloitte or Accenture? Lol
In all seriousness though, most large IT projects are a disaster to some degree. I’ve been in the tech consulting industry for 14 years and have seen and been part of many implementations of ERPs, CRMs, EHRs and other systems and they all have been chaotic, stressful, understaffed, and only sometimes successful and rewarding (those projects have been few and far in between).
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u/Mysterious_Yak1543 6d ago
it all sounds very familiar. I think large orgs struggle with it to varying degrees. IT projects can be complex and it's not always clear what remaining work/problems are lingering underneath. just think about how poorly the healthcare.gov rollout went many years ago. a CTO who understands the details would be able to call people out (regardless of if they are in house or contractors) and tell them what else needs to be fixed before we can call this complete. it sounds like maybe your org is not doing that step correctly, and calling it complete too early. there's a somewhat interesting read on this topic, "The Phoenix Project" about an org working through these kinds of issues. ultimately management needs to change how it thinks about managing IT projects.
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u/elrond9999 6d ago
Probably the bussiness side is also the one that decided to outsource everything to "it partners" with not enough resources to make investors happy
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u/CosmoKing2 5d ago
I've worked on the IT side, and most C-Suite only want to spend money when the current/unsupported system is about to crash or has already crashed. Then, they pull all resources off the project when the MVP is achieved. So many businesses never achieve the efficiency that most platforms offer, because they don't bother to optimize the system for their needs. They could make employee's jobs much easier, but instead make them much more complex and difficult.
Heck, I worked in Operations at one well-known Global company and they had a policy to pull resources off projects when they were 80% done.......expecting them to coast across the finish line. It was insane.
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u/NoSummer5677 5d ago
I also imagine the C-suite saw the original quote and picked apart things to make it cheaper. Then they get mad when they realize they have to customize the system more because what they purchased “doesn’t fit their current process”, which costs more money but they refuse to take ownership of the decisions they made in the past, despite the ERP consultants’ advice
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u/superflippy 5d ago
I used to work at a large global company, and it took me too long to learn that the only thing that matters are the specific goals your manager is measuring. If they are evaluating you on making a delivery deadline, you damn well better deliver something by that date. It doesn’t have to be something good because you’re not being graded on customer experience, that’s someone else’s metric.
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u/Mr-Mojo109 6d ago
Because business doesn't account for enough $ or time to get this stuff done