SAP Project Flight Recorder

Failed SAP projects feel like aviation disasters. “Oh, the humanity!” is an appropriate exclamation. Carsten Leschke writes: "what if we took a page from [the FAA]'s book and applied it to failed SAP projects?", putting forward an approach to monitoring, reporting, and practicing to learn from project failure.

Some great suggestions!?

• No finger-pointing allowed. Teams that I work on that embrace this are the best ones.?
• Get your data together. Make a "black box" with ALL the possible relevant project-level info that could be relevant for crash review, and then create consistent reporting around that data.
• Practice makes perfect. Hey, maybe try out a fun game like Dominik Panzer presented?

I foresee some challenges in making true failure learnings real. And just like the above are all essentially human behavior-driven, so are the challenges. The biggest thing that pops to mind is that when projects crash and burn, everyone's attention is focused on making sure the business can still work. Trying to compile reports and do post-mortems will always wait until the fires are put out…and often once the fires die, so does the will to do anything further. People will wander away (or be forced out, if they're consultants).?

Maybe the analogy breaks down because often it won't be outside investigators cleaning up the crash. It'll be the crash victims (SAP project staff) themselves. PM

This story was previously published in the Boring Enterprise Nerdletter #69. Subscribe now to get new stories in your Inbox!