Who specifically will be on our project?
By name, with their availability. The team that sold the project is frequently not the team that delivers it, and partner turnover was the primary cause in 8% of the stalled projects we examined.
Directory · buyer guidance
For partner-implemented products — Acumatica, Business Central, Sage Intacct, NetSuite — the partner determines the outcome more than the product does. The variance between a good and a poor one exceeds the variance between the products they implement.
Send it over. We will tell you which lines are soft and what to ask before signing.
Before you sign
Each of these maps to a primary cause of failure in the forty-one stalled implementations we were brought into. They are not general diligence — they are the specific things that went wrong.
By name, with their availability. The team that sold the project is frequently not the team that delivers it, and partner turnover was the primary cause in 8% of the stalled projects we examined.
A partner who tracks this and will say it is a different kind of firm from one who deflects. Our own sample puts the median at +27%, so an answer near zero deserves a follow-up question.
Vendor-supplied references are selected. Asking for the difficult ones separates partners immediately, and the ones who provide them are usually the ones worth working with.
From interviews, or from our transactions? Unsettled requirements were the primary cause in 31% of stalled projects, and interview-only requirements are the most common reason they move.
It will be. The answer should be a defined process and a commercial position, not surprise. Data problems were the primary cause in 24% of stalled projects and were nearly always found during load.
A partner who cannot answer this has not thought about the failure mode that accounts for 19% of stalled projects — a sponsor who attends everything and cannot decide across departments.
The content of the answers matters less than whether the partner has a considered position at all. A firm that has thought about its own variance, its own staffing risk, and its own failed projects is a firm that has processes around them.
Deflection is the signal. “Every project is different” in response to the variance question means either they do not measure it or the number is bad. Both are worth knowing before signing rather than in month four.
The single most common gap between the sales process and delivery is staffing. The partner’s best consultant is in the room for the pitch and on three other projects by the time yours starts.
Ask for names, ask what else those people are committed to during your timeline, and put the named team in the contract with a clause covering substitution. Partners who resist that are telling you the pitch team was not the delivery team.
Vendor certifications measure product knowledge, which is necessary and not the thing that goes wrong. Nearly three quarters of the stalled projects we examined failed on requirements, data, or decision authority — none of which certification tests.
Deployment count in the last twelve months, for companies of your size and shape, is a considerably better signal. A partner with forty certifications and four recent deployments is a different risk from the reverse.
Most buyers spend their negotiating effort on rate. The terms that actually protect you are elsewhere, and partners have more discretion on them than on price.
We are not an implementation partner for any vendor and take no referral fees from any partner or vendor. We also compete with these firms — we implement our own product and we rescue other people’s stalled projects. Read this page knowing that. The check on it is that everything here maps to published failure data rather than to a recommendation to use us.
Questions
For partner-implemented systems, the variance between firms exceeds the variance between the products they implement.