Digital Systems
Business Systems Implementation: What Goes Wrong
System projects rarely fail for technical reasons. The recurring failure patterns are organisational and visible early.
In our experience the software is seldom the constraint. The constraint is how the project is structured, owned and sequenced inside the organisation.
Recurring patterns
- Licences purchased before processes are documented.
- Every module attempted simultaneously rather than stabilising one area.
- Existing data migrated without cleaning, importing old problems into a new system.
- No internal system owner, so nobody administers the platform after deployment.
- Training delivered once, at the end, to whoever was available.
- Legacy spreadsheets maintained in parallel indefinitely.
What replaces each pattern
A documented current state before selection. A phased deployment with a defined first area. A data-cleaning step with named owners. An internal owner supported by external administration. Training built into deployment rather than appended to it. And a decision, taken deliberately, about when the parallel spreadsheets are retired.