Risk 1Ownership exists on paper but not in the calendar.
Business owners must have time and authority to make decisions. A sponsor cannot protect a project they only see in monthly status meetings.
- Decision owners and due dates are visible.
- Escalations happen before they affect the critical path.
- Finance, operations, IT, and the implementation partner use one risk record.
- Scope changes include effort, cost, timing, and control impact.
Risk 2Requirements describe features instead of business outcomes.
Statements such as “supports reporting” or “handles approvals” are too broad for design and testing.
- Requirements include actors, data, approvals, exceptions, controls, and expected output.
- Future-state process decisions are documented before configuration is finalized.
- Reports and integrations are treated as scope, not post-go-live cleanup.
- Acceptance criteria can be tested by business users.
Risk 3Data, integrations, and testing are planned too late.
These workstreams expose design mistakes. Delaying them creates false confidence in the configuration timeline.
- Migration test cycles start early enough to change mapping rules.
- Integration failure, retry, monitoring, and ownership are tested.
- User acceptance testing covers end-to-end business scenarios and exceptions.
- Reconciliation is defined for balances, subledgers, inventory, open transactions, and interfaces.
Risk 4The go-live date becomes more important than readiness.
A target date creates focus, but it is not evidence that the business can operate and close accurately.
- Critical defects have agreed severity and closure rules.
- Cutover tasks have owners, timing, dependencies, and fallback actions.
- Users can execute daily operations and month-end responsibilities.
- Support coverage, triage, and escalation are ready for stabilization.
Intervention signalIf the project cannot produce a current decision log, risk register, test summary, migration reconciliation, and go-live checklist, sponsor intervention is already overdue.