The KPI dashboard showed green across the board. Budget on track. Timeline on track. Quality on track. Six months later, the programme was put on hold. The CFO and the Head of Controlling had never agreed on what success looked like.
This is a real story. Details have been changed to protect the people involved. The pattern is one I have seen more than once.
The Situation
A European industrial company. A EUR 50M SAP S/4HANA transformation. An experienced programme team. A strong integrator. Monthly steering reports — all green.
Month eight. The CFO asks for a forecast on financial close capability post Go-Live. The Head of Controlling provides a different number than the programme's Finance workstream. The difference: six weeks of additional parallel running time, EUR 800K in unplanned costs.
Neither number was wrong. They were based on different assumptions. Assumptions that had never been aligned.
What ent wrong?
The programme measured what it could measure: milestones, budget consumption, open issues. Those numbers were green.
But the critical questions had never been formally decided:
What does Finance sign-off on Go-Live actually require?
Who owns the definition of "ready" — IT, Finance, or the programme?
What is the fallback if month-end close cannot be executed in the new system?
The programme was steerable on paper. It was not steerable in practice. Because the steering logic — who decides what, based on which information — had never been designed.
The Pattern
This is not an SAP problem. It is not a Finance problem. It is a governance problem.
Programmes fail not because the data was wrong. They fail because the decision architecture was missing. Green dashboards report the past. They do not tell you whether the decisions that matter have been made.
Your data is not the problem. Your steering logic is.
What would you have done differently? Reply — I read every answer.
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C · Structure First
Helping finance and programme leaders build steering logic that works.