A McKinsey study of over 5,400 large IT projects found that they run an average of 45% over budget and deliver 56% less value than predicted. The budget overruns make headlines. The value gap is the quieter, more expensive problem. And in most cases, that gap traces back to the same place: change management that was planned too late, staffed too thin, or treated as a communications exercise rather than a core part of the project.
For SAP S/4HANA projects in particular, the stakes are higher than usual. The 2027 ECC end-of-mainstream-maintenance deadline has compressed timelines across the industry. Change management delays that might have been absorbed in a multi-year program become project-threatening when you have 18 months of runway left.
Why Change Management Stalls
Gartner estimates that more than 70% of ERP initiatives will fail to meet their business case goals fully, and as many as 25% will fail catastrophically. Prosci’s benchmarking research, conducted over more than two decades, consistently identifies active executive sponsorship as the top contributor to success, and its absence as the top obstacle. These are not new findings. The question is why organizations keep falling into this trap.
The answer is usually structural, not attitudinal. In a traditional SAP implementation, the first several months are consumed by requirements workshops, blueprinting, and system design. Change management activities such as stakeholder mapping, communication planning, and training development are scheduled for later phases. By the time they begin, the system design is largely locked, and the people who will actually use it have had little exposure to what is coming. End users then see the system for the first time at the time of testing, raise concerns that should have surfaced months earlier, and the project team scrambles to address them while simultaneously preparing for go-live. Training gets compressed. Resistance builds. And the go-live date either slips or gets forced through with inadequate adoption.
The pattern is very old. For example, in 1999, in the famous case of a chocolate company, they compressed a $112 million ERP deployment from 48 months to 30, cutting corners on testing and training to meet a Y2K deadline. The system went live in July, right before the company’s busiest sales period. Orders stopped flowing. Hershey’s could not fulfill $100 million in orders for products it had in stock, quarterly profits dropped 19%, and the stock fell 8%. The system itself was not the problem. The people and processes around it were not yet ready. Three decades later, we still see many organizations repeating the same pattern.
The Four Delays That Compound
Change management delays in ERP projects tend to cluster around four specific bottlenecks.
Late stakeholder engagement. When business leaders and process owners are not involved until the build is underway, they inherit decisions they did not make. This produces resistance that looks irrational from the project team’s perspective but is entirely predictable. A 2025 Horváth study of over 200 SAP executives found that while 90% of companies have begun their S/4HANA transformation, the soft skills and capability-building required for successful adoption are routinely overlooked.
Understaffed project teams. ERP implementations require dedicated resources. When organizations assume existing employees will absorb project work alongside their regular responsibilities, everything slows down. Prosci’s data show that insufficient staffing is a primary reason 38% of ERP projects exceed their budgets. The people assigned at 20% availability deliver 20% of their attention and 100% of the delays.
Compressed training windows. Training consistently gets the smallest allocation of time and budget despite being the most visible determinant of user adoption. When training is rushed or generic, end users fall back on manual workarounds and shadow spreadsheets. Hershey’s failure is the extreme version of this: training phases were sacrificed to meet the timeline, and the resulting chaos cost the company an entire peak season. In 2026, organizations compressing S/4HANA migrations into tight windows are running the same risk at scale.
Misaligned incentives with the systems integrator. Most SI contracts are structured around certain deliverables. Change management is often a separate line item, billed hourly, with no contractual tie to actual user adoption or business outcomes. This means the SI can deliver a technically complete system while the organization is functionally unprepared to use it.
What Mitigation Actually Requires
The research is consistent on what works. McKinsey has found that nearly 80% of companies with successful digital transformations clearly communicated the need for change and their objectives from the start. Prosci’s data shows that projects with excellent change management are seven times more likely to meet their objectives. Gartner identifies strong alignment between ERP initiatives and corporate strategic goals as one of the top predictors of success.
But knowing what works and being able to do it are different things. The structural challenge is that traditional implementations do not give people something real to react to until it is too late to change course cheaply. You cannot run meaningful change management against a blueprint. People need to see, touch, and test the actual system before they can understand what is changing and why. An organization can follow Prosci’s ADKAR model, Kotter’s 8-step process, or any other proven framework. If the system does not exist in a usable form until very late in the project, no framework will compensate for the lost time.
How LeapGreat Changes the Sequence
We built LeapGreat around a different sequencing principle: give people a working system first, then refine it together. Our team has been implementing SAP ERP systems for over three decades, going back to R/1, and we authored the SAP Best Practices Manufacturing Baseline. We developed a SaaS platform that produces a fully working SAP S/4HANA system configured with your business data within a week of receiving your requirements.
For change management, this has a practical consequence. Stakeholder engagement can begin against a real system, instead of a document. Process owners can identify gaps, test workflows, and raise concerns while the project still has room to adjust. Training can happen on the actual system your people will use, not a sanitized demo environment. Each round of feedback from your team feeds into the next refinement cycle, and because the platform automates the rebuild, an updated system iteration comes back in days rather than weeks.
The total implementation runs in less than half the time of a traditional approach. But the change management advantage is not just speed. It is that the people side of the project runs in parallel from the outset with the technical side, not as a late-stage add-on. We explored this pattern in more detail in Why SAP Transformation Programs Discover Problems Too Late.
The Window Is Narrowing
Only a third of SAP’s ECC customers have migrated to S/4HANA, according to Gartner data reported by CIO. At the current migration rate, nearly half will still be on the legacy platform beyond 2027. For those organizations, change management is not an item to revisit next quarter. It is the factor that will determine whether they make the deadline with a functioning system or merely a technically complete one that nobody is able to use.
See your working system in one week. Schedule a live demo and risk-free test drive today.
