If our estimates hold, we will complete our ERP project 18 months after we started searching for a new system. We chose carefully, after negotiating for six months. The contract is signed, the celebratory meal is a pleasant, high-calorie memory, and the final toasts to our success have been made.

Now it's time to make this thing work.

One of our first major decisions was the approach: big bang or little bangs? If we chose big bang, converting all of our branches and departments at once, everything would ride on one go-live event. Quick and clean as a scalpel, unless something went wrong. In which case, big bang could take on a much more sinister meaning. After reading so many ERP horror stories over the years, big bang looked to us like a digital version of Godzilla. If we cut the project into phases, however, Godzilla could be transformed into a bunch of harmless, insect-eating geckos.