What has to be decided before a Business Central project starts?

Three things must be in place before the kick-off, not after: a sponsor with decision-making power, clearly formulated business outcomes and a governance model that defines who decides what bindingly. If one of them is missing at the start, you catch up later under time pressure, and that is exactly where the expensive course corrections arise.

Which three decisions are mandatory before kick-off?

Three things belong before the start and not in the first project week. If one of them is missing at kick-off, you make up for it later under time pressure, and it is exactly at this point that the expensive corrections of course arise later.

• Sponsor: a person with real decision-making power and budget responsibility who tips the balance in conflicts of goals and also enforces it. A project without a sponsor who can prevail renegotiates every week what should long since have been settled.
• Business outcomes: how exactly do you measure success, in business language rather than in feature lists? A faster close, more reliable figures, fewer breaks between systems. Without that target picture, the scope becomes a wish list.
• Governance model: who decides on scope, data model, prioritisation and critical interfaces, and who is only heard? These roles belong named before the first question comes up.

How do you set data ownership and decision cadence?

Two further points make the difference between a steered project and one that is merely driven, and both cost nothing beyond a decision:

• Data ownership: one data owner per master-data domain, so that data quality has a named responsibility and does not remain a collective one.
• Decision rhythm: a fixed rhythm in which open items are settled, and a decision service level of 1 to 3 weeks.

The data owner is deliberately one person and not a committee. A collective responsibility for data quality reliably leads to nobody holding it, and that only surfaces during the migration, when it gets expensive.

Control therefore stays on your side, from day one. If you are facing a kick-off, it pays to examine these five mandatory decisions honestly first. That is exactly what we do together in a conversation, with Business Central as home.