I remember going to a training on project management where they told story about a project manager at a major research university who was told to estimate what it would cost to implement Peoplesoft and was let go when he told the truth about what it would cost.
They brought in a "Yes Man" who came in with the lowball estimate that management wanted and figured they could bring the cost down further by stealing people's time from other people's projects.
The project broke the $100M budget that was floated by the initial project manager and they only completed 1 out of 5 modules. Of course other IT projects across that university were screwed up and damage was done to the careers of many innocent people.
The good news is that based on that screw-up and several others around the same time that Uni greatly improved its management practices.
Forgive my ignorance of "Enterprise" software, but what does "implementing Peoplesoft" involve, exactly? Isn't it like SAP where it's a base system with some predefined starter templates that you customize? And to "customize" means just adding custom fields and data-entry forms, and wire it all up to an ERP and something like Biztalk? How does that add-up to $100m?
By the time you come to a size where you would consider SAP or PeopleSoft, you are already a mid to large size company. You have developed internal process and workflows. You would have policies put in place that are crazy, contradicting each other and different across divisions, business lines and roles. You are trying to model all of this in a software that was not organically grown in your company. This is what implementation mean.
The truth is that, you are better off throwing all your process away and just use the pre-built stuff from the ERP system and adjust it as you go along. But very few companies have the courage to accept that their process were fucked up in the first place.
My understanding is that Peoplesoft worked out OK for most corporations but it went notoriously wrong in higher ed. Australia tried to roll it out over numerous universities in a huge project which went terribly wrong.
I had my own personal Peoplesoft story which was that they cut n' pasted a Javascript random number generator I wrote into their home page before Javascript had a built in RNG and so my email was embedded in a comment in their page. It's one reason why my email got spammed so much in the 1990s (later on I found out my email was the most spammed at my Uni).
Another amusing story is that David Duffield, founder of Peoplesoft, got pushed out of Peoplesoft when Oracle took it over and he founded Workday which turned out to be much more successful for higher ed institutions.
They brought in a "Yes Man" who came in with the lowball estimate that management wanted and figured they could bring the cost down further by stealing people's time from other people's projects.
The project broke the $100M budget that was floated by the initial project manager and they only completed 1 out of 5 modules. Of course other IT projects across that university were screwed up and damage was done to the careers of many innocent people.
The good news is that based on that screw-up and several others around the same time that Uni greatly improved its management practices.