Originally published on Start at Zero on Substack.
Most of what gets written about government ERP these days reads like a warning label, with stories of blown timelines, payroll that went sideways and councils demanding answers, and while I understand why those stories get attention, I have come to think they leave public leaders with a strange kind of advice, which is basically to be very afraid and then go buy something anyway.
I would rather talk about the agencies that get it right, because they exist, and in my experience they are not luckier or better funded than everyone else. What sets them apart is that they treat the ERP as a decision they have to make well rather than a product they have to pick, and they do most of the important work before a single vendor walks into the room.
They decide what the work is for
The agencies that win start by asking what their finance, HR and payroll work is actually supposed to accomplish, and they write the answer down in plain language that a council member could follow. That sounds obvious, but the more common pattern I see is a project that begins with a product category and a contract expiration date, where the question on the table is which system replaces the old one rather than what the organization needs to be able to do in five years that it cannot do today.
When you start from the outcome, a lot of decisions get easier. You can tell the difference between a process that is genuinely unique to your agency and one that is simply familiar, you can decide where bespoke software makes sense and where it is just a habit dressed up as a requirement, and you have something to measure the vendors against other than their own slide decks. This is what I mean when I talk about starting at zero, and it is the part of the work that gets skipped most often because it feels slower than writing an RFP.
They name one owner, and they mean it
Every successful project I have been close to had a single person whose name was attached to the outcome, someone senior enough to make tradeoffs between finance, HR and IT, and someone who had the time carved out of their week to actually do it. Steering committees are useful, and I would keep one, but a committee cannot own a decision, and when the hard calls come up in the middle of a configuration workshop, somebody has to be able to say yes or no without scheduling a meeting for three weeks out.
The owner also needs to be on the agency’s side of the table. I have seen projects where the de facto owner turned out to be the implementation partner’s project manager, not because anyone planned it that way but because that person was the only one who had the whole picture, and once that happens the agency is no longer steering, it is being steered, however good the intentions on the other side.
They get honest about readiness
The agencies that do well take a hard look at themselves before they buy, which we call Phase Zero at Avero. That means an inventory of systems, integrations, data quality, process owners and staff capacity, and an honest conversation about whether this is the right year to take on a project of this size given budget season, audits and everything else that will not pause for an implementation.
Sometimes the honest answer is that the agency needs six months to fix its chart of accounts or settle a reorganization before it is ready to select anything, and the leaders I respect most are the ones who are willing to say that out loud. It takes a certain kind of courage to slow down a project everyone is eager to start, but it is a lot cheaper to learn it in Phase Zero than in month fourteen.
They make the vendors prove it on their own work
When it is time to evaluate products, the winning agencies stop watching presentations and start running tests. They script the demos around their own real scenarios, such as a grant that spans fiscal years, a retroactive pay adjustment for a bargaining unit, or a month end close with the usual pile of corrections, and they ask every vendor to work through the same scripts with the same data so the comparison is fair.
I have watched this change the tone of an evaluation within the first hour. A vendor’s standard demo is designed to show the product at its best, which is perfectly reasonable from their point of view, but a scripted demo shows you how the product handles your worst Tuesday, and that is the day you are actually buying for. The staff who live with these processes should be in the room scoring, because they will notice the extra clicks and the workaround hiding behind a confident answer long before anyone in leadership does.
They keep their advice independent
This is the piece I feel most strongly about, and I will admit I have a point of view, since buyer-side advisory is what my firm does. The agencies that get the best outcomes make sure that the people helping them choose a system have no financial stake in which system they choose or in who implements it.
The market does not always make this easy to see. Plenty of advisors also resell software, hold partner status with a particular vendor, or count on the implementation work that follows the selection, and none of that makes them bad people, but it does mean their advice comes with a gravity you should know about. My suggestion is simply to ask, in writing, whether your advisor has any partnership, referral or implementation relationship with the vendors under consideration, and to treat the answer as part of the evaluation. If you want more on how to make that call, I wrote a longer piece on choosing an independent ERP advisor that walks through the questions I would ask.
They define done as working, not live
The last habit is the one that ties the others together. The agencies that win do not define success as go live, because go live is just the day the old system gets turned off. They define it in terms of the outcomes they wrote down at the very beginning, such as a faster close, fewer manual reconciliations, cleaner reporting to the council or a payroll team that is not working weekends, and they keep measuring against those outcomes for a year or more after launch.
That shift changes how the whole project gets run. Training gets funded properly because adoption is part of the definition of done, data cleanup gets treated as real work with real owners because bad data shows up in every outcome metric, and the post launch period stops being an afterthought and becomes the place where the value actually gets captured.
The path is not a secret
When I lay these habits side by side, what strikes me is how unglamorous they are. None of them requires a visionary leader or a breakthrough product, and all of them are available to any city, county, state agency or university willing to do the thinking before the buying.
The doom stories will keep coming, and some of them are worth learning from, but I would rather public leaders walk away believing that a good ERP outcome is something you can plan for, because in my experience it is.
If you’re in the middle of an ERP or AI decision and want a second set of eyes before you commit, book a free 30-minute decision review with me at startatzero.averoadvisors.com
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