Why SAP Projects Fails??

Question

Hello abapers, right now i'm writing a paper for the company that i work, this paper it's related with SAP Projects, i would be so glad if you let me hear your comments about What are the reason that you think that makes SAP Projects Fails? It an IT related stuff.
I want collect all your comments based on your experience implanting SAP Projects. This is important to me because a will see closer the common problem around the world and will not localized my paper use only issues that i may know.
Regards,
Carlos.

Answer 1

Hi Carlos,
You have touched upon a major topic here and I am not sure if you can ever close this post. But let me give it a try. Let me try to put it into perpective by discussing the topic following the project lifecycle.
Now any ERP implementation starts with a requirement at the top level to refine their IT landscape to better support the business. Then you go out to search for the best tool to do that. That can be your first point of failure, if you don't identify the right fit(ERP software) for your organization. I was on a SAP project where they thought SAP is the best fit for their business, but 6 months into the project, they realized that even though SAP is the best ERP software around, it didn't fit their needs. They scrapped the project and went for custom development in Oracle.
Then comes your choice of the implementation partner. A big implementation like an ERP implementation cannot be completely sourced with inhouse resources. You meed a implementation partner who has the experience to steer you though the implementation and make it successful. Now this is not specific to SAP, but with SAP you have to be even more careful on this aspect because of the costs and time involved.
Once you have identified SAP as the tool and identified your implementation partner, you then venture into the identification of implementation team from your organization. Depending on which modules you are implementing, you want to identify teams that have a very healthy mix of business knowledge, experience in specific areas of the company's business functions, technical expertise that can easily adopt and learn new software quickly. If your team is not chosen wisely then there will be a makor gap between the requirements and their translation into implementation.
Defining the scope of the project is also important. By doing this, you will identify which processes you will implement in SAP and as a result which applications you will replace with SAP and which applications you will interface with SAP. If you fail to correctly identify this, then the project will fail.
An ERP implementation means a lot of change and that means all your end users, your implementation team, your management and basically everyone should be ready for it. This involves a major investment(not necessarily monetary) in change management. There will be a change in the way you do things and everyone should be ready for it. If they are not, then there will be a failure in effective use of the tool thus effecting its utility to the organization and the productivity of the employee.
After you are past the requirements phase and team preparation phase, you enter the design phase. The project can make or break depending on what happens in this phase. This is where the implementation team goes out to define the business processes, identify requirements and translate them into configuration and development specs etc. If any of the tasks here go wrong, then the final product will be a failure.
In the development phase, it can be any or all of the factors like lack of technical expertise, lack of usage of best practices, lack of standards, lack of supporting infrastructure etc.
Other factors include, support from top management and business process owners for the project(they should be the stakeholders in this), political aspects of the client place, integration requirements etc.
As Anand pointed you first need define 'failure'. In a project as big as an ERP/SAP implementation, a complete scrapping of the project can be a failure, or not completing the project on budget, on time could be a failure or not being able to deliver one specific critical functionality can be a failure. So as you can see, the definition of the failure itself can be so different for so many implementations.
Even though your question is specific to SAP, my answer is more generic and applicable to any large scale project. SAP inherently has no in-built faults that make a project a failure. As long as you keep all the above factors in control, you should have a successful project.
Hope this discussion continues.
Srinivas