Defining the ERP Project Goals What your Project Success
has to do with the 1969
Moon Landing

The Moon Landing Project

It has been over 53 years since the whole world watched spellbound in front of the television as Neil Armstrong took the first step onto the powdery surface of the moon. The idea that human-beings would one day walk on the moon had begun with a vision. A dream. And finally, after more than eight years of concrete planning, NASA turned this gigantic project into reality. Dreaming of the initially unthinkable, sticking to it despite difficulties and accepting risks - these were necessary prerequisites for the success of the “Apollo 11” mission.

Your ERP Project

Even if your ERP project is of course neither comparable with the effort nor the risk of a moon landing, the starting point is nevertheless similar: your project is also about taking aim at a goal that may still be a long way off, represents an enormous challenge and demands a great deal from you. To create the opportunity to really make a difference by achieving it.

What do you want to achieve? What do you want to improve?

So what goals are you setting yourself for your ERP project? The starting point for all the decisions and actions you take in the course of your project are your long-term goals. What do you want to achieve concretely with your project? What do you want to improve?

Some companies are already satisfied with modernizing their IT tools. Their goal might be to migrate from an on-premises to a cloud solution. But if these companies take their dusty business processes, their old data, their old reports and their outdated ways of thinking about customers with them, they are wasting potential.

The question is why you should be satisfied with such a project goal! That would be roughly comparable to the Apollo 11 mission, which, instead of landing on the moon, had only planned to reach lunar orbit and then return to earth and be satisfied with this goal. Would you have been satisfied with that?

Defining Objectives: formulate them clearly and align them with the Corporate Strategy

The success of your project therefore begins with defining your goals. This involves not only technical goals, but also business goals in particular, which you should also link to your corporate strategy. After all, your team needs to know what it is working towards. When formulating your goals, it is best to use the SMART method.

Higher Standards = higher Growth Potential

Understatement is out of place here. For example, aim to become the most customer-oriented company in your industry. Or to take on a pioneering role in digital transformation.

Aiming for such ambitious goals will definitely make your project more demanding and challenging for everyone involved. On the other hand, being ambitious can also unleash an unimagined amount of energy and brilliant ideas in your team.

Who does what? Why this is
the Key Question in the
Preparation of an ERP Project

The Management must be involved

In addition, your top management must be actively involved in the process - not “should”, but “must”. After all, this is about the long-term success of your company and this requires complex decisions which in some cases only management is capable of making.

And even in difficult moments or when conflicts on a human level arise, the management is required to set the direction. For example, the crew on the way to the moon had to rely on support from the control center in Houston when they encountered difficulties that they could not overcome on their own.

Ambitious Project Goals - surpassing yourself and conquering new Territory

The then American President John F. Kennedy, who decisively pushed the moon landing project, put it like this in his famous speech in 1962:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

And you can apply this sentence to your ERP project. High goals are more difficult to achieve and of course there is a risk of failure. However, they offer you the chance to grow beyond yourself and achieve much more than your competitors. This won’t work if you choose the easiest way or just do what you’ve always done. Or what your competition is doing. It’s up to you: do you just want to replace your software or do you want to conquer new territory with your team? 🌑