The digital transformation project was supposed to be straightforward.
A global manufacturing company needed to implement S/4HANA across more than 100 countries worldwide. It was meant to be a “lift and shift” with minimal changes. That meant taking existing SAP systems, including any custom code, and moving them to the new S/4HANA platform.
Instead, it became a masterclass in how the biggest projects can collapse without proper planning.
“There were failures in the planning of the project,” said the Pivot project manager brought in to rescue the finance workstream.
The scale of the dysfunction was significant. The finance workstream alone had over 100 people working on it, subdivided into different teams. Some teams had their own plans. Others had no plans at all.
“Everybody was called a PM,” said the Pivot project manager. “But nobody knew what they were working on.”
The company couldn’t maintain accurate records of their own team.
“They didn’t have a true record of how many contractors they had, how many internals they had. They were moving people on and off without telling each other.”
For capacity planning, this created an impossible situation. How do you plan resources when you don’t know who’s working on the project?
The biggest challenge wasn’t technical, it was human. Teams weren’t communicating. The transformation lead and IT lead had conflicting priorities, that they’d send to their respective teams.
“The biggest challenge was getting them all to communicate together, and that wasn’t just finance, it was across the piece,” said the Pivot project manager. “A lot of the time, there were red flags raised all over that weren’t red flags. They needed to talk to each other.”
The solution started simple. Pivot began calling project managers across different workstreams with one basic question: “What are you planning to do for the next six weeks?”
The turning point came through the most basic of tools. A tracker.
“We used a tracker, with lots of links in there,” said the Pivot project manager. The global tracker included capacity planning, timings, dependencies, and resource allocation.
But the power wasn’t in the technology. It was in the visibility it created.
“We could see when teams had far too much on, when they didn’t have enough on, when we could start challenging,” the Pivot project manager said. “The test team wanted something that they didn’t need for six months. We could challenge back to the test team because we had more visibility.”
The tracker’s impact spread beyond the finance team. Other workstreams – sales, deployment – started asking if they could use it.
The global tracker revealed something crucial. It provided evidence of what the Systems Integrator (SI) was doing.
“There was a turning point when we could understand what the SI was doing,” said the Pivot project manager.
Before the tracker, the SI could “talk around things, and there was nothing on paper that we could track them to.” The tracker changed that dynamic completely.
The weekly programme meetings had been exercises in confusion. “The SI put initiatives on there for the six-week plan. I’d cross-reference and say, ‘What does this mean? Is it on our list?’ Then I’d find out nobody owned that initiative, so nothing was going to get done.”
“Thanks to the tracker, they were more on the back foot than they’d ever been,” said the Pivot project manager. “Now we could challenge their solution and lead more.”
Eventually, the SI was removed from the programme.
“The decision to let them go was probably already made. But this was evidence behind it.”
The approach reflected Pivot’s core philosophy. Start with the basics and avoid over-engineering. The global tracker wasn’t sophisticated technology, but it solved the fundamental problem. Nobody could see what was happening across the programme.
The solution didn’t require complex systems or expensive software. It required experienced project managers who understood SAP S/4 transformation programmes. Pivot brought that experience to the table. It was the kind of proven track record that the SI’s leadership team lacked.
“All the teams were happy that there was visibility there, that they could see what was going on.”
The project rescue demonstrated several critical principles.
Before implementing sophisticated solutions, establish fundamental project management disciplines. Teams can’t coordinate if they can’t see what others are doing. Documentation enables constructive challenge and course correction. Most “technical” problems are communication problems. Complex situations need simple solutions, not complex tools. And delays and lack of governance always cost money.
