The road to project success – how do you prevent budget overruns?
Most print companies would view budget overruns in time and money as the primary threats to the success of their business software projects or digital transformation initiatives. Thus, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to plan to prevent these overruns. Let’s analyze some factors that can lead to implementation budget deficits, and what to do to avoid them.
The reality is that most businesses are inexperienced when it comes to budgeting for project success. And that makes sense, simply because they only modernize or replace MIS/ERP solutions every 8 to 10 years – or even longer. This observation makes it even more important to prepare your budget planning very well.
Here are 5 important causes of print MIS/ERP implementation budget overruns.
- Incomplete budgets
This probably is the simplest cause that you can control, making sure that the budget is complete and that it contains enough bandwidth to achieve success. Categories that are often underestimated these days are to be found in the areas of end-user training and organizational change management. It’s hard to overspend on change management!
- A poor preparation phase
The most important part of your preparation must take place before the consultants of your designated Implementation Partner enter the building. For effective budget management, it’s crucial that you know what you want to achieve and how you want to do that before the meter starts running. Starting with the right internal preparation on time is crucial to control your financial budgets.
- Underestimating the complexity
Many print companies underestimate the complexity of implementing new print management software. They still believe that it’s a technical project, while ignoring the fact that a new solution often requires the team to work, think and act in a completely different way.
- Underestimating the amount of work
The same goes for the amount of work. At the time of negotiations, all focus is on the new project, and everybody is highly involved and super enthusiastic. Unfortunately, once the project starts – other priorities can appear on the radar, such as winning that one big new customer, or an unplanned reorganization, like key staff members getting ill or leaving the company. Without the right focus you will eventually be forced to outsource a bigger part of the work to your Implementation Partner. Exceeding your spend becomes a natural consequence.
- Stop adding complexity – save it for phase 2!
A last important cause of budget overrun is adding complexity during the implementation process. Many organizations lack the discipline to stick to the agreed functionality and the amount of change as defined before the start. Of course, it’s tempting to give in to the extra wishes from the organization, but it will ruin your financial budgets, your time budgets and the motivation of your teams! So, it’s always better to avoid (extra) complexity. Add all good ideas to the so called ‘optimization list’ and use that document to define step 2 of the implementation process once step 1 is done. This is a great way to manage and control complexity and stick to your financial budget.
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