I read many articles on best practices/strategy for ERP upgrades. There is nothing really earth shattering about these best practices I noted in these articles as these are pretty routine and bookish type. None of these articles talk about

1. What you should not do during your Upgrade or in the preparation for your Upgrade?
2. The need for custom strategy based on typicality of a particular vertical or organization.
3. What should be the strategic objectives of an Upgrade?

We really don’t have metrics to understand the history of failure or success. Success or failure means in terms of triple constrains and others.

Based on my information, the focused objective of most of the pure Upgrades (not re-implementations) that are successful has been just “Upgrade” no new modules implementation during the course or preparation time of Upgrade. Focus will be more business optimization within the scope of existing modules taking advantage of new functionality and technology as much as possible. There are no hard and fast rules for code freeze but this is one critical decision that could bring stability to the Upgrade process.

We need to go beyond the standard best practices to come up with a custom strategy based on an organization’s unique characteristics to be able to successful. This is more applicable to organizations that have geographically distributed work places and users.