As we all know, many unique and time-sensitive activities occur in all areas of business, government, or even research. Those activities, regardless of their specific nature, can be managed using the project management approach with its associated tools and techniques. This approach is generally intended for assessing the progress of projects and using the necessary and relevant resources of an organization to ensure project effectiveness and completion within planned time-frame and assigned budget.

Enterprise software is big business. This becomes evident when you add up the costs of purchasing software licenses, implementing the system, migrating data, training employees, and maintaining the system. If your enterprise system doesn't meet your expectations, you risk running some of your investment down the drain. Unfortunately, it is quite common for companies to take shortcuts when determining their software needs, which often leads them to acquire a system that doesn't exactly match their business requirements.

Everyone wants their business to grow, to broaden its operations within a territory or country and, eventually, across borders to other countries and continents. However, business expansion abroad entails a great deal of forethought, especially with regard to enterprise software applications.

Since the 2008 economic crisis hit, many firms have been forced to cut back in order to keep their businesses afloat. Enterprise software spending is one area where cutbacks have been most noticeable. But now that the global economy is starting to rebound and information technology budgets are unfreezing, companies are evaluating upgrade or replacement enterprise resource planning systems with added functionality to support their changing business needs.

The good news is that software acquisition does not happen often, but the bad news is that this infrequency uncovers another hidden facet of such projects. Employees and management of a company that do not purchase and implement a significant number of software applications on a regular basis are, in fact, amateurs that are mandated to deal with software vendors whose only order of business is to develop, promote, and sell their software, every day.

Buying a large enterprise software system is not something that many organizations do on a regular basis. While software vendors are constantly hyping the benefits of their particular system, buyers do not necessarily have the background needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.