Buy-in Is the Starting Line when it comes to ERP Implementations

Leading the ERP Project When the Client Is the Hard Part

Last week at a Microsoft Partner Event,  I opened my session with one question: On your hardest project, was ERP actually the hard part?

I asked for a show of hands. Software first, then people. You can guess how it went: almost every hand went up for people.

That’s the premise of this four-part series. If the client is the hard part, then leading the client is the job. And leading the client isn’t a one-time event at kickoff. It’s the work you do every week after that.

A signature is not the same as buy-in

Most of us treat buy-in as a milestone. The sponsor signs the SOW and the steering committee nods at kickoff. Everyone leaves the room excited, and we check the box.

But signing and being engaged are two different things. I walked through a composite scenario that every delivery leader in the room recognized:

A manufacturer is six months into the project. The operations director approved the design but skips every workshop. His team follows his lead and starts missing meetings and calls. His planners still run production from spreadsheets, and test sign-offs come back blank. His explanation: “It doesn’t fit how we work.”

He gave his approval. Did we have buy-in? On paper, yes. In practice, the project was already failing slowly.

Clients are rarely difficult people

Clients are rarely difficult people. They are people in difficult conditions, and three conditions show up again and again, usually together:

1. Alignment is fragile. The sponsor, the process owners and IT each describe a different project. Everyone signed the same statement of work and pictured a different outcome.
2. Trust is thin. Every status report gets audited and every estimate is assumed to be padded. Often that distrust was inherited from a previous partner or a failed attempt, so you’re paying off a debt you didn’t create.
3. Pressure is high. The date was announced before anyone understood the scope, and the end users are already frustrated.

None of these is fixed at kickoff. Each one quietly wears down the buy-in you thought you had.

This is not an IT project, it’s a change to your business process

One line from the talk got a lot of nods: This is not an IT project. It’s a business process project.

When the client team sees ERP as “the system IT is putting in,” the people who own the processes step back. They wait to be handed something. Then, predictably, they tell you it doesn’t fit how they work.

Real buy-in means the business owns the outcome and a decision maker is in the room. It can’t be delegated to whoever happened to be free that afternoon.

Set the tone at the start

Here’s the line that got the most reaction: The client is not your friend.

That doesn’t mean the client is your adversary. It means the relationship is a partnership with expectations on both sides, and those expectations have to be set on day one. That includes who attends, who decides and how fast decisions get made. It also covers what happens when someone doesn’t show up.

If you wait until month six to set those expectations, it looks like you’re changing the rules. Set them at kickoff and they’re simply how the project runs.

What to do when a stakeholder goes quiet

Back to our operations director. At the event, the room split three ways: escalate over him, go around him or go to him. Here’s the order I recommend:

1. Go to him first, and alone. Ask what he stands to lose. Resistance is usually a loss nobody accounted for: control, headcount, or his standing as the person who knows how the plant really runs. The cost: you may hear things you can’t fix.
2. Then make the risk visible. Put the parallel spreadsheets on the steering agenda as a risk with an owner. That’s accountability, not burning a bridge. The cost: he’ll feel exposed if you skipped step one.
3. Give him a real decision. Hand him a design choice that matters on his floor, backed by a business justification. People defend what they shaped. The cost: you have to live with his answer.

The order matters. If his name shows up on the steering agenda before you’ve sat down with him, you’ve made an enemy, not a partner.

The takeaway

Buy-in is where the project starts, not where it’s won. Resistance is information: it tells you what someone is protecting. Our job as a partner is to find out what it is before it shows up as blank test sign-offs.

Your turn: What did you do the last time a key stakeholder went quiet?

Next in the series: what happens when leadership leaves the room, and how to keep the client team motivated, supported and accountable day to day.

Authored by Brendan Murphy , he has spent an unreasonable amount of his career willingly untangling the inner workings of manufacturing and distribution operations and somehow still finds it fascinating. Brendan specializes in helping mid-market companies implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central in a way that actually fits how they work, with a particular affinity for the cable and wire industry, where the problems are complex, the copper prices are unpredictable, and a well-built system can change everything.