Why ERP Projects Require More Than Classical Project Experience – and How AI Can Help

Many skilled project managers are thrown into their first ERP project with the same tools that have always worked for them. But those tools rarely work here, because an ERP project is unlike anything else.

An ERP project impacts the entire company: business processes, job roles, master data, and governance. This means that as a project manager you are not only managing deliverables – you are leading a transformation journey with multiple parallel tracks: technical implementation, process (re)design, master data design, data migration, training, organizational change, and supplier management across several parties, each with their own interests and methodologies.

This requires a different approach than classical project management.

How do you manage functional scope when decisions continuously change the business processes along the way?

How do you create momentum when the timeline is more influenced by organizational readiness than by technical capacity?

And how do you establish governance that unites the business, the system vendor(s), and the system integrator(s) into a single coherent track?

ERP project management is a hybrid discipline. The best project managers understand that they are not managing an IT project, but rather an organizational project with technical components. And this is where generative AI can help project managers develop precisely that understanding.

Project managers can already use AI today to identify risks that lie in the intersection between organizational maturity and technical capabilities, and to suggest transition paths by combining fragmented and dispersed knowledge in new ways. This leads to stronger decision support and a far more nuanced overview.

For many years, I have conducted ERP program reviews. I continuously maintain my questionnaire – a series of questions covering everything from simple facts to strategic and maturity-related topics. I use the same framework in the projects where I am actively involved as project manager or advisor.

Today, I have built my own private GPT and fed it with this questionnaire. I continuously add updated responses – just as you would in ongoing stage-gate reviews. The result is a GPT that understands the project’s history and context and can, within seconds, generate everything from status reports and trend analyses to early warnings about organizational capacity issues or other risks that would otherwise only become visible when it was too late.

If you design your questions correctly – and answer honestly – you will be helped to better understand the evolving dynamics between the system, the value-creating business processes, and the people who must execute them in the future.

So, start building your own GPT. It doesn’t require anything particularly technical, but it can fundamentally change how you lead ERP projects.

This column is the second of three on project management in ERP projects. If you want to strengthen your handling of the critical phases in an ERP implementation and gain access to a proven toolbox based on experience from hundreds of projects, you can sign up for HNCO’s two-day ERP project management course for experienced project managers.