In 
Rajiv Saxena sat with his eyes closed, hanging on to every word that his guru chanted.
Visualise your success, dont let the failures pull you down.
Visualise your success, dont let the failures pull you down, guruji repeated.
One of the biggest secret of success lies in learning from failure, continued guruji.
While the words soothed, they also created a twirling of conflicting thoughts in Rajivs head as he was battling the near failure of a major IT implementation at work. Rajiv worked as the GM (IT) for an FMCG company that had a wide spectrum of food and beverage products.
Sitting in a contemplative state, Rajiv reflected upon the moment when he was called by his boss Vikas Sharma five months ago.
Rajiv, we are battling with a waste issue, a lot of our inventory is coming back, unused because it reaches retail shelves late, said Vikas.
And the management feels that deploying an ERP solution is the only way out, so lets get cracking.
Sleepless nights
Rajiv had spent many sleepless nights in the last five months. Everything from getting the RFP in place to finally selecting the vendor had been a challenge, but the real downhill journey started when the rollout began.
And the management feels that deploying an ERP solution is the only way out, was the one-line mandate that Rajiv had been working on. Now in retrospect, he realised that the requirement was very vague and abstract. In a flash it came back to him.
With no real inputs from end-users, Rajiv and his team had been building what they believed was needed and not what was actually needed. The other aspect that had compromised the project, he realised, was their limited knowledge and understanding of the real business issues. So, inevitably when the system was delivered to business users, they only found limited use of it.
Rajiv fished out his notebook and scribbled something.
Delivering value
Rajiv continued his pursuit for answers and researched more on the Internet. His second flash of enlightenment came when he saw a survey report by UK-based advisory firm Dynamic Markets. The report indicated that while three out of five IT projects fail to meet their schedules, two out of five fail to deliver the expected business value.
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