If your SAP programme is missing milestones, the time for passive oversight has passed. You need intervention.
The history of enterprise ERP is littered with catastrophic failures. When Revlon went live with their SAP system, they lost $64M in sales because they could not fulfil orders. When Zimmer Biomet went live, minor integration issues compounded into a supply-chain failure resulting in a $172M shareholder lawsuit.
In both cases, the board was receiving green status reports right up until the system collapsed.
To prevent your organisation from becoming the next case study, the board must recognise the warning signals of programme drift and act before the go-live date.
The six signals of imminent failure
If the SI misses the first two major milestones, the baseline plan is already invalid. They will attempt to compress the testing phases to catch up — transferring the risk of failure to your business.
Development is late, so User Acceptance Testing is cut in half. The SI is shifting the risk of failure entirely onto your business — you become the QA team for a system that should have been tested before it reached you.
The SI rotates out the lead architect or programme director you signed the contract with, replacing them with less experienced resources. The people who promised the outcome are no longer accountable for delivering it.
The SI begins issuing a high volume of Change Requests to recover margin on technical complexities they failed to identify during Discovery. The contract you signed is being repriced one CR at a time.
Core requirements are suddenly reclassified as Phase 2 or post-go-live enhancements to protect the launch date. What you are getting at go-live is no longer what you bought.
The executive summary is green, but the underlying workstream metrics — defect ratios, code quality, integration test results — are red. Green on the outside, red on the inside.
Independent validation in the intervention zone
The SI is not your partner. They are a vendor. Their incentive is to maximise billable hours and protect their margin. If you allow them to govern themselves, you are abdicating your fiduciary responsibility.
An independent Programme Risk Review provides the board with the unvarnished truth about your SAP transformation. TRC acts as your independent governance authority — interrogating the architecture, the contract, and the reporting to expose hidden risk.
Stop guessing. Start governing.
