Specifying General Activity Clusters for ERP Projects Aimed at Effort Prediction

Abstract

ERP implementation projects affect large parts of an implementing organization and lead to changes in the way an organization performs its tasks. The costs needed for the effort to implement these systems are hard to estimate. Research indicates that the size of an ERP project can be a useful measurement for predicting the effort required to complete an ERP implementation project. However, such a metric does not yet exist. Therefore research should be carried out to find a set of variables which can define the size of an ERP project. The authors hypothesize that ERP projects consist of a collection of clusters of activities with their own focus on implementation costs and project size. This was confirmed in a survey among domain experts. This chapter describes a first step in retrieving these clusters. It shows 21 logical clusters of ERP implementation project activities based on 405 ERP implementation project activities retrieved from literature. Logical clusters of ERP project activities can be used in further research to find variables for defining the size of an ERP project.