Daiwa House Industry in Japan recently announced that it finished its recent ERP implementation ahead of schedule--a feat rarely seen in the IT world. The company came away from the effort with six important lessons, which three of its executives share in an article by Bob Lewis at InfoWorld.

The first lesson out of Daiwa House is that critical-chain project management works better than traditional project management because it helps ensure that sufficient staff resources are available when a task is scheduled. If, instead, a company tries to maximize its staff by having workers multitask, it is likely to lead to chaos as workers move from one task to another in an unpredictable fashion, which is the second lesson.

"Every switch means getting one's head out of one task, reorienting, and getting it back into the other task," Lewis writes. "This process is neither effortless nor instantaneous. The lesson is clear: Let employees finish what they start, even if that means they occasionally find themselves with nothing to do. All in all, they'll be far more effective and productive."

The third lesson is to define "clear exit criteria" for tasks, so that employees don't veer off into unnecessary "apple polishing," which is Daiwa House's term for obsessing unnecessarily after a project is good enough. Fourth, avoid over-defining a task's details because that leads to micromanaging and diminishing returns. 

The fifth lesson is to make sure that business improvement goals--rather than IT project goals--are well-defined. The ERP implementation at Daiwa House began as an effort to improve HR management, support compliance duties and close the books more quickly, Lewis reports. But as time went by, the project became more about deploying improved business processes and practices.

Finally, make sure all members of the team have a big picture perspective on the project so that all of the components come together coherently.

For more:
- see Bob Lewis's article at InfoWorld

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