There is no shortage of case studies reflecting upon the challenges of large package deployments such as ERP, and the news isn’t usually positive, with numerous examples of projects that come in late and/or over budget, and more significantly, deployments that fall considerably short on fulfilling business value expectations.

There are many drivers for these failings, but one of the most fundamental is an inability to rigorously manage the quality aspect of the deployment process, the people engaged in the teams and the work deliverables at the critical milestones.

Traditional project metrics only confirm that the activity is “checked off” and not that the quality of the activity is sufficient to meet the business functionality required to drive the project to a successful outcome.

The lack of a simple, concise way to measure this sufficiency of activity is often quoted as a critical concern for project management as they have struggled to establish and present status reports that can be efficiently and objectively assimilated by project sponsorship, governance and oversight teams. Further, this challenge to efficiently represent the health of the project continues to be a barrier to gaining acceptance for remedial actions that can be succinctly justified in terms of rework avoidance or benefit achievement.

As with any quality issue, the intent should be to identify and address defects as early in the deployment process as possible, since the fall-out from these defects accelerates significantly through the lifecycle of the project. In real world situations though, it proves extremely difficult to present a compelling indicator of “impending doom” that can spur early remedy. This is confirmed by many case studies from Gartner and Forrester that report projects that have recognized many early “red flags” but still continued to absorb large amounts of non-productive resource for significant periods of time before finally being cancelled or redefined.

Lighthouse’s approach to quality in packaged software application deployments (ERPWatch™) is an independent, unbiased methodology that changes your organization’s fundamental mindset around quality. This shift to the consideration that “discovering defects is good” and “discovering defects early is better” is a critical factor in the success of our quality and risk management services.