Podcast · Over Budget · EP 04

Governance in ERP projects: what actually works

Governance in ERP programmes: what actually works day to day.

Host
Frank Maier
Date
06.05.2026
Guest
Marco Hartmann
Length
48 min
Listen on Spotify

What this podcast is about

  • Why governance is a living process, not a document
  • Why a lack of trust is the most common governance weakness
  • How change control boards give project managers the backing they need
  • Why ERP projects are business, not IT projects

Projects rarely fail because the software cannot do it. They fail because decisions are unclear, delayed, or constantly reopened.

In episode 4 of "Over Budget", Frank Maier talks to Marco Hartmann, a project lead with decades of experience in large international ERP programmes. The subject is governance: what it really means day to day in a project, and why it determines the outcome more than the methodology does.

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The key takeaways

  • Governance is a living process, not a document. Every project has a charter. The ones that fail are those where that charter is written once and never lived again.
  • The most common governance weakness is not a lack of structure but a lack of trust. Where team members do not raise problems openly, no committee helps.
  • Avoiding decisions solves no problems. It pushes them into the future and lets cost and complexity grow with every step.
  • Change control boards give project managers the structural authority to say no. Without a formal process, changes get decided informally, in passing.
  • International rollouts need explicit, written rules on what country organisations may and may not change, agreed before the project starts.
  • The preparation before the steering committee decides whether the meeting works. Without prior alignment it becomes a stage for surprises.
  • ERP projects are business change programmes, not IT projects. That is exactly why governance is so demanding: the project has to keep ongoing operations running alongside it.
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Governance is more than a document. It is a process that has to stay alive throughout the entire project.

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