Landing a $10m+ ERP rollout for a regional telecom
Led delivery of the largest ERP engagement in the firm's history — a multi-country rollout for a major telecom group — and the establishment of the mobile-development division alongside it.
Heads up: placeholder draft based on the public bio. AJ will refine specifics and replace where anonymization is too aggressive.
Challenge
A regional telecom group had outgrown a patchwork of finance, HR and ops systems. Procurement, payroll, asset tracking and customer-facing billing were all on different islands, and an attempted internal modernization had stalled. They needed a single ERP rollout across multiple operating entities, on a fixed budget, with no acceptable downtime windows.
Two things made it hard:
- The group structure was complex — different operating companies with different fiscal calendars, statutory requirements and reporting structures.
- The internal capability to drive the rollout simply didn’t exist — they were procuring delivery muscle, not just software.
The contract was, at the time, the largest in the delivery firm’s history.
Approach
I led the engagement end-to-end as Head of Delivery. The work split roughly into three phases:
- Foundation (months 0–4). Hard alignment on a single global chart of accounts and master data model. This is the deeply unglamorous work that determines whether the project ships at all. We pushed back on five “edge cases” the client wanted to keep — three turned out to be reportable to the same parent line anyway.
- Country-by-country migration (months 4–10). Sequenced by operating company, smallest to largest. The smallest companies caught the integration issues before they hit anything load-bearing.
- Hand-off (months 10–14). A measured ramp-down of consultant headcount while internal product owners scaled into the ownership model. We refused to leave on a date — we left on a condition (incident rate below threshold, 95th-percentile close-cycle under N days).
In parallel, I incepted, hired into, and led the firm’s new Mobile Development division — which started life inside this engagement (mobile approvals for the ERP) and grew into a stand-alone P&L.
Outcome
- Multi-country ERP live on time and on budget, with zero unplanned downtime through cutover.
- More than 160 projects delivered for 100+ clients across the team during my tenure — corporations and governments alike.
- Led a cross-functional international team of 50+ at peak.
- Established the Mobile Development division from zero into a delivery line of its own.
- ~$10m+ in revenue under my responsibility.
Lessons that travel
- The master-data argument is the project. Everything downstream — reporting, audits, integrations — is just consequence. We over-invested in months 0–4 and under-invested everywhere else, and it paid off.
- Sequence by smallest first. Counterintuitive, but the cheap migrations buy the team enough wins to handle the painful ones.
- Leave on a condition, not a date. It changes the incentives on both sides.
This is an anonymized summary. Specific client details, contract figures and individual identities have been redacted; the engagement profile is accurate.