Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor. After the CTO and I expressed our concerns about the scale of the project and the sheer amount of functionality involved, the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" and were more than prepared, which was music to the ears of the CFO.
Daily 2-3 hour meetings followed (for many months) to define the scope of the project. Within each meeting I sort of zoned out because it became very obvious that no only did the vendor not understand the scale of the work involved, but had started cutting corners everywhere/leaving out crucial functionality, and this was just the scoping stage, no development had even started yet.
I eventually departed the company but kept in contact with the CTO and learned that after 5 years (project was scoped for 2), the migration was abandoned costing multiple millions of dollars with nothing to show for it.
the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.
If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers.
If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time.
I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everything is more difficult, slower, and just all-round bad. But they "had" to do it. (Narrator: No, they didn't.)
E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP are designed to work. This is their edge over competition, their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine, while selling various bullshit left and right, and constantly lying to given company how everything is fine and under control.
Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always is.
They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite). It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being told how rosy your future will be.
Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
French poet Paul Valery once said: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned".
It is the same for those projects. You just gotta keep paying forever.
Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time. Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea so good it had REAL PMF, and made that.
But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.
Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how many times a customer makes a purchase from the same salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting) it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying from the same guy for years, there's often very different types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the sketchy used car salesman type, but after working with great salespeople I know better. This is a big blind spot for us techical/engineering types.
Estimation is hard but it seems it's far too easy for the vendor to blatantly lie with all the risk on the customer.
the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.
Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!? They still can't get out of the wet paper bag, because otherwise "we'll someone might start selling candy or something unapproved" > we'll isn't that's what your franchise liaisons and agreements are for?! I'm just beside myself.
I'm so hyped on this because this one 'immovable problem' prevents me from having API access to my locations accounts. Everything just hurts. /rant
And then live forever with two systems running side by side.
128k/ year, while RT still runs in a VM for all the other ticketing queues.
Lots of powerpoints.
If you're not part of the solution, be part of the problem.
I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I despise working in corporate america.
America might lead the way, but corporate anything, anywhere is pretty terrible.
Trying to build a total second system is nearly impossible if it's big and old.
I feel this on a deep level since the ERP system at our company is in the middle of moving to one of these big vendors and so much is simply not working out, extending timelines and development cycles. Cost only goes up and ROI is pushed out beyond the horizon.
PLM is equally bad and a horror show of legacy vendors trying to sell their solutions with the promise of customizability. Again the small, more modern players in the PLM space are constantly ignored for the big legacy ones and it turns out those legacy platforms even in their latest iterations are inflexible at best or downright hellish at worst. The reason behind all of this? Service contracts and vendor lock-in are the main drivers of value for these vendors, rather than quality (and modern) engineering.
I have a current client that is a mirror of this exactly. They had one new executive go to a sales demo, and the sales guy told him it would be "live" in a few months, and he believed it. It was so laughable and downright embarrassing for the client. In this case, I know it is at least a 3-year project if you have competent team members and vendors. It also depends on how you define "success" and how many business processes you are willing to break. However, these can stretch into 5 year projects when you are working with mission critical systems running accounting and payroll. In those cases, you cannot move fast and break things.
Most organizations don't have competent teams, and the vendors are often made up of low-skilled offshore workers, which makes nuanced, complex projects very complicated. The sales side will promise the world then the implementation team is low skilled and underdelivers.
I have seen this with several other clients, replacing pieces of PeopleSoft modules with different applications. Sometimes they come back and sometimes they just suffer through it and then find a third option after the new system fails to deliver.
Most ERP systems are just CRUD systems. So, you end up with a working CRUD system being replaced by a new CRUD system. The old system had its strengths and weaknesses. The new system will solve some problems and break others.
You spend 3-5 years replacing a system only to end up in the same place you were before: A CRUD system. This is maddening unless you are the new vendor and getting enriched.
