Governance in ERP projects: what actually works

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.