What is Devil’s Advocate

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages can be described as the most sought after means of organisational transformation and IT innovation since the mid 1990s. Over the past decade, ERP packages have become a major part of the organisational landscape and form the cornerstone of IS architectures for an ever increasing percentage of organisations. Despite the strong push toward enterprise-wide ERP systems in the wider organisational community and the experience accumulated over 20 years of large scale integrated systems implementations, there is, in relation to ERP deployment, a lack of understanding of the specific project management required to counter the difficulties that can arise when organisations fail to ensure that all the required factors of success are present in their projects. Therefore, novel ideas to help managers and project managers to better prepare for enterprise-wide ERP projects are badly needed. This entry presents a method of practical relevance for organisational decision-makers by introducing the concept of a devil’s advocate workshop—reminiscent of Klein’s premortem sessions (Klein, 1993, 2002), but tailor-made for large scale Information Systems projects—which leverages the concept of sense-making, in introducing a preplanning “intelligence” phase in any enterprise-wide ERP project life-cycle.