SAP-Centric Projects

There is a price to pay if one is not going to use SAP's project management capabilities. Frequently the above reaction reflects an incomplete look at the full picture. Project owners too easily forget that they are part of a whole. Quite often the overall organization benefits substantially from using process standards across operational and project management functions. Examples are materials management, HR, purchasing, sales, accounting, or treasury.  

More so, the integration with such functions can also directly benefit projects managed with SAP. Reconciliation efforts can be significantly reduced, the pool of labor trained to perform purchasing functions (for example) is suddenly much wider, the information flow between sales orders and project deliverables or milestones can reduce coordination requirements and the management of customer expectations, and so on.  

There is also one often underestimated reason why people are reluctant to grant a stronger role to SAP. The move from a PC-based project management tool like MS Project or P3 to a client-server based environment like MS EPM (Enterprise Project Management) or Primavera Enterprise (P3e/P6) was or is a quantum leap for many project management professionals. Suddenly visibility gets greater, but the need for coordination and adherence to standards is significantly increased as well. If one then defines a job narrowly, there is no value-add. Visibility is for others, coordination and standards are limiting ones flexibility, and so on. Frequently, people consider this too much control granted to others. How much more must they then see SAP as a threat!  

Of course this neglects the fact that they get better and more information faster, and that they can focus on analyzing and interpreting data (could that be a definition of "project management"?) instead of entering, reconciling and communicating.