Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Thursday 6/11/2003
I have never made a secret of the enormous incomprehension I feel when confronted with consultants. Individually they're not too bad, but when they mass into an army and set out to lay siege to corporate budgets I fear for my sanity. I simply cannot understand why people give them so much money for what seems to be evanescent drivel. Words fail me – but not before I try them out: balderdash, witless meandering, expensive heaps of steaming offal disguised as prime steak. I really should ask the Earl of Erroll for tips next time I have to deal with these people. 

Take today's press release from Cap Gemini Ernst & Young: New Approach To ERP Projects Set To Deliver 20-30 percent ROI. This wonderful New Approach is called EDPI, or Event Driven Package Implementation, and it alone can help the problem that nearly sixty percent of customers don't believe they get a return on investment from enterprise resource planning. No matter that they got so disappointed because they believed the bloody consultants in the first place – no, what they need is yet more of the same sort of thing.

And what is EDPI? It's based on Criticality, Collaboration and Culture. It counters failure to achieve full stakeholder buy-in -- the "project bubble" -- and initiative overload. Got that? It incorporates techniques that are capable of delivering results: it's not just a one-off workshop, but a series of significant landmarks in a projects lifecycle.

No, we didn't understand it either. So we phone up and ask. "Explain this in two sentences", we said. Fifteen sentences later, we got it. EDPI is -- ta-da! -- having meetings.

That's it. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young have reinvented the meeting. I'll leave it to the company to say why having meetings is such a good idea.

"Many ERP project teams simply don't communicate how they will help realise key business strategies and therefore they fail to achieve full organisational buy-in. We ensure all stakeholders fully understand how the ERP project will help them realise their business goals, thereby creating a Solution That Sticks."

Thanks, CGEY. We'll let you know.