ERP projects rarely fail because of the system
They fail because the right people are missing. A UK government case shows why this matters for the mid-market too.
The UK project watchdog has rated one of the government’s largest ERP programmes “red”. That is the sharpest warning level. In plain language: there are serious problems, and at this stage they do not look manageable or recoverable.
The programme is called Matrix. Nine departments are meant to move to shared ERP and HR systems. Contracts are worth around £144 million. Go-live was planned for May 2026. It is now slipping towards late 2026, at best. The Register reported on 20 July 2026 on the red rating and the delay.
The technology was not the bottleneck
This is the part every management team should read.
The watchdog was clear: the core system issues had largely been addressed. The technology was broadly working. So what was the biggest risk for the entire programme?
The departments could not free up the internal experts needed for testing.
Read that sentence again. A £144 million programme. Years of work. It stalls not because the software has failed, but because the organisation cannot spare enough of its own people to test whether things are really right before go-live.
Not an isolated case
In the same week, an analysis of dozens of major ERP and transformation programmes appeared. The result: resource shortage was the most frequent critical risk, present in 64 percent of the programmes reviewed. Planning errors followed at 52 percent. Technology barely featured. Consultancy.uk published the analysis on 9 July 2026.
Anyone who has worked around ERP projects knows the pattern. It is the quiet killer. And almost nobody plans it honestly.
The trap
Your best people are exactly the people you can least afford to pull into a project. The experts who truly know how the business runs are the same people keeping the business running. If you move them into the ERP project, someone must take over their daily work. That backfill is rarely planned. Even more rarely funded.
So the project works with whoever happens to have time. Those are rarely the people with the deepest process knowledge. Tests become rushed. Requirements remain incomplete. Decisions are made without the full context. The gaps appear at go-live, where they are most expensive to fix.
“We will find the time” is not a resource plan. Nor is the assumption that a team can carry a major transformation next to daily operations without something breaking.
Three questions for your own programme
- Have you named the specific people whose knowledge the project really needs, and formally protected their time?
- Is there a real, funded plan to cover daily operations, or are you hoping the same people can do both?
- When testing starts, do the testers really understand what “right” means?
What successful organisations do differently
They treat internal capacity as a fixed part of the plan. Not as an afterthought. It is one of the least spectacular lessons in the industry, and one of the most often repeated.
The most sophisticated ERP system in the world is worth little if the people who understand the business are too deeply tied up in daily operations to make it work.
What this means for the mid-market
In mid-market companies, the issue is even sharper than in government. Fewer buffers. Fewer specialists. More knowledge concentrated in a small number of heads. An ERP project that involves key people only “on the side” builds the mistake in from the start.
Software is rarely the real bottleneck. Organisation is. If a company approves budget for licences and implementation, but not for protected time and backfill, it is buying delay and rework.
PRODVIS practice view
PRODVIS supports mid-market B2B companies with ERP, processes and digital transformation. Think global, act local: we do not start with the tool. We start with the people who carry the operation, and with the honest question of whether their knowledge is truly available in the project.
Next step
In a short capacity check, we can clarify whether your ERP or Exact Online programme is really staffed for the critical phase: with the right people, protected time and a workable backfill plan.
Sources and further reading
Original impulse: Eric Kimberling, Transformation Strategy Committee / Stratosphere, article on the UK Matrix ERP programme and resource risks in ERP initiatives, July 2026.
Further reading: The Register on the Matrix programme and Consultancy.uk on the most common ERP and transformation risks.