How long may decisions take in an ERP project?

Set a decision service level: open project decisions belong made within one to three weeks. Anything beyond that is not a scheduling problem but the earliest and most reliable warning sign of a governance problem. An ERP project moves at the speed of its decisions: if a single question stays open for three weeks, all dependent work piles up behind it, and one delay quickly becomes five, because each team waits on the next. The service level is the simplest remedy: establish that every open decision is made within one to three weeks, and make visible who makes it. If it is missed regularly, that is not a slip but a finding about your governance. The advantage of this measure: it costs nothing and cannot be gamed. Unlike a percentage complete, a decision has either been made or it has not.

Why does decision speed determine project success?

An ERP project moves at the speed of its decisions. If a single question stays open for three weeks, all the work depending on it piles up behind it. One delay quickly becomes five, because every team is waiting on the next.

The decision service level is the simplest instrument against that: establish that every open decision is made within one to three weeks, and make visible who makes it. If that level is regularly missed, that is not a slip but a finding about your governance.

The advantage of this measure is that it costs nothing and cannot be manipulated. Unlike a percentage complete, which can be estimated at will, an open decision has either been made or it has not. That is why it is the one figure that ought to appear in every status report, even where nobody asks for it.

Why is decision latency an early indicator of governance problems?

Long decision paths reveal missing governance before the budget or the date visibly tips. Whoever watches the decision latency sees the problem weeks earlier than in the traffic-light report. The frequent cause is rarely capacity:

• No one is allowed to decide bindingly, the role is not named.
• The person who would be allowed does not have enough insight into the trade-offs.
• Open items are settled without a fixed rhythm, everyone waits for everyone.

Both are governance, not a shortage of people. The lever is correspondingly simple: a named decision-maker per subject area, a decision log, and a fixed rhythm in which open points actually get settled. Control stays on your side.

If decisions regularly sit for too long at your company, that is rarely coincidence. Let us look in a conversation at where exactly the steering is stuck, with Business Central as home.