Pendere, Inc.

More enterprise projects fail than are successfully completed.   Basic organizational issues are often the root cause of failure.   Implementing enterprise solutions are complex for any number of reasons.

Frequently the business and IT organizations are not aligned.   Executive sponsorship  may be insufficient or the company may not be ready to undertake a large enterprise initiative without significant changes to the organizational structure.

The cross-functional nature of these types of projects often impacts hundreds or thousands of employees, who may or may not want to be impacted.  There are multiple competing priorities.  Executives and other employees may not want to give up control of their sandbox.  Organizational priorities are preempted by divisional priorities.  It is not uncommon to justify the ROI of an enterprise solution by headcount reduction.  This causes anxiety in the workforce  that can  undermine implementation.

Requirements are not easily elicited because of business process reengineering (BPR) or business process improvement (BPI) initiatives. Thus, requirements must be formulated across multiple business units.

Organizational structures and skills for managing large, complex enterprise solutions are complex and often underestimated.  Companies tend to try to staff these large projects in similar ways as smaller projects without a clear understanding of how much additional structure and rigor must be taken into consideration because of all the many moving parts and cross functional dimensions.  Project team members must become specialists and treat areas such as project management, requirements engineering, software engineering, testing and configuration management as a practice – not something that is done ad hoc or if there is spare time.

Effecting change in an organization is “just hard.” The impact of organizational change is usually underestimated, or in some cases not even included as an integral part of the initiative.  Yet, this is an area that is almost always significant, requiring a well-thought out change management plan to assist in promoting end user adoption.

Unless a company has experience implementing enterprise solutions, the effort, schedule, complexity, project structure, resource needs, and competencies are grossly underestimated.  Because proper plans with discrete milestones and controls aren’t put in place at the beginning of the project, expenditures into the millions of dollars may occur before executives are aware that the project is failing.

Pendére consultants are highly experienced in how to structure enterprise projects for success from the beginning.  We understand critical success factors and we know the common causes for project failures.  Pendére will work with companies to ensure that realistic expectations are set up front, the initiative is positioned for success from the beginning, the project organization structure is sufficient to support the initiative, the team has the right skills, there are appropriate methodologies, processes, and tools to manage and control the project.

Pendére consultants can provide training and mentoring to the project team.  We can match your key employees with a mentor to promote a learning culture and help the company scale the talent that will be required to manage the project to successful completion.  We can also fill key roles to manage various aspects of the project.  Pendére is flexible and will work with the company to determine the optimal engagement model.