New research about ERP projects reveals a number of unnerving facts: ERP implementations take a long time (almost always much longer than anticipated), cost more than projected, and often deliver less than a half of anticipated benefits. At the same time, general IT projects seem to deliver increasingly more predictable results.

Why the difference? General IT projects usually rely on  an increased adoption of agile methodologies.

Agile is an unpopular word in the ERP world. We, the ERP people, love the glory and the thunder of The Waterfall. It has worked for us since forever, after all. Yes, we've all seen it fail every so often, but we've learned to learn from failure, and we know there is no better approach. Don't we?

Frankly, I am not completely sure we do.

To start with, what is agile? Most of people who don't know it think of it as some sort of laissez-faire approach to software development: there aren't fixed requirements up front, so there is no order, there is anarchy.

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