Jun 15 / Matt Wood

ERP Project Management Hairball

Managing Complexity is expensive

Some of you will remember this fun and iconic marketing campaign from NetSuite, now Oracle NetSuite. It spoke to many of us in the IT industry and also ERP purchase decision makers. Surveys tracking the primary concern of most CIO's and IT Directors have consistently identified the integration of multiple different applications, written in different programming languages, on different infrastructure platforms as their highest risk, issue and cost. This is the hairball.

What is the ERP Hairball?


Keeping those integrations working involves maintaining skills and knowledge for each application in addition to the integration tools. This complexity is a headache and NetSuite knew it. The message was simple. 'Buy this product and we will take away the mass of integrations and customisations and by inference, your pain'. This is no comment on the software itself, NetSuite is great for some, and not great for others as in reality, even with a pure cloud ERP such as NetSuite, there can still be a hairball - how messy it gets is more dependent on how much process is held outside of the core ERP system than on the software itself.
However, in concept, it does demonstrate the complexity of ERP project management. That hairball, unpicking it, changing it, upgrading it, it all needs careful management when moving to new or upgraded ERP software. This is where the ERP project manager comes in. The video is over 10 years old but it's still relevant today. Software has become better at talking to each other through better API and low code integrations, however business has moved more core processes onto software applications, so the complexity and risk is as great as ever.