London councils to spunk £25m on SAP deal Haringey and Waltham Forest councils have advertised for a framework contract to deliver an SAP solution valued at between £12m and £25m. In a notice in the Official Journal of the European Union the two London councils say the eight-year deal will cover a wide range of services. They include software development, project …
Last two SAP roll-outs went fine, in budget and even ahead of schedule. Initial SAP implementation was another story (almost a year behind schedule, about 20% overbudget, and with half the savings lost because features we'd wanted couldn't be implemented on time), but the learning curve on that initial jaunt helped us plan more realisticly since. A strong project manager with real SAP knowledge, and with a high-powered cattleprod to keep the beancounters in check, seems to be key.
While I can see that one SAP system could support a load of local councils (not just 2), so provide good value, the public sector IT record says we will probably be reading "lessons learned" in about 2016, once this is all scrapped..
It's not even like Haringey has a good record so far...
http://www.lynnefeatherstone.org/issues/haringey-council
I'm a SAP ABAP developer, it's my day job. Our system is well run and maintained and runs the business efficiently. We develop new features slowly in consultation with the business and we consistently deliver on time, to budget (often under budget) and save the company money or allow it to do something new. I am proud of what we do and have done.
Our parent company also uses SAP, their system is a spaghetti mess of code and exceptions. Everything they do is a disaster, costs a fortune, arrives late and causes chaos. Most SAP projects go like this and it's not really SAP that's at fault. It's poor project management that is usually at fault and we all know how good government and local government is at that...
While I accept that "our" SAP system is an exception, don't blame the more typical failures on SAP. Business systems are complex and people are not good at doing complex things.
"The solution has to be based on "typical local government processes""
So it'll only clean up its trash bin every two weeks, be completely unavailable except when noone wants to use it, completely ignore user requests, keep demanding more and more money whilst becoming slower and less responsive, display increasingly threatening but incomprehensible messages to innocent users and kill off services that are in use without explanation. Outstanding!
The problem with any SAP implementation is decision by committee. What you need is key decision makers who can make and stand by their choices. Group decisions are like 20 women choosing a dress and this is absolutely the case in ERP implementations. Unless you focus experts in field on the process it will fail.
Problem is that in public sector every decision seems to be made by committee so...
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