When should your ERP system go live?

I'm fan of big bangs implementation, love the challenges, as the team says here "Go big or go home" :). Maria don't hesitate to send me an message in the inbox if you want to disclose more info about the ERP that you are implementing.

Amusing anecdote on the big-bang implementation:

20+ years ago, my employer was implementing a multi-billion dollar digital transformation of their configuration management and ERP systems. The implementation had been taking much longer than anticipated and a frustrated senior executive demanded that we just move ahead, "flip the switch" implement everything over the weekend, and work out the problems from there.

When we came back on Monday, nothing had changed. Some unfortunate soul had to explain to the C-suite that there is no actual switch to flip and that is only a figure of speech. It actually involves massive amounts of data migration from hundreds of independent systems into the new system.

The moral of the story is the big-bang implementation approach may be a lot more difficult than it seems in the sales brochure.

How it turned out was that the enterprise abandoned the completely non-feasible direction that we just had to start using a system that was not even close to operational, and continue with the plan laid out by the technical team. It was analogous to disconnecting the power to your house mid-winter with the expectation that you'd just have to find a solution.

The root cause was the major stakeholders were dictating orders without understanding the nature of the work. It was a bit like attempting to direct a moon landing without understanding basic physics.

Another fun memory from this was that the executive had set an annual goal that all "legacy systems" would be eliminated by the end-of-year due to this new software. That goal was met by renaming "legacy systems" to "classic client". Mission accomplished.