Why ERP Projects Go Over Budget and Behind Schedule — and How to Avoid It

Testing compression is the third recurring pattern, and arguably the most dangerous because it's usually invisible until after go-live. When earlier phases run long, testing is frequently the phase that gets cut to protect the go-live date — which means problems that testing would have caught instead surface in production, in front of customers and employees, which is a far more expensive place to discover them.

Underlying most of these patterns is a more fundamental issue: unclear ownership of decisions. When it isn't obvious who has the authority to say no to a scope change, or who's accountable for signing off that data migration is genuinely complete, small ambiguities compound into large delays, because nobody feels empowered to make the call that keeps the project on track.

The data on this is fairly consistent: projects supported by experienced implementation consultants report an 85% success rate, meaningfully higher than the broader average, and leadership support is cited by 77% of respondents as a critical success factor — not a nice-to-have, but something project outcomes actually depend on. The common thread across the projects that do stay on track isn't luck; it's specific, deliberate practices: a scope that's genuinely locked down before work begins, with a formal change-control process for anything added later; a realistic, and often uncomfortably long, budget for data cleansing built into the plan from day one rather than discovered midway through; and testing phases protected from compression even when other phases run long.