Case Study - Resetting a Stalled Dynamics 365 Program at a National Distributor
A national wholesale distributor with hundreds of locations was well into a Microsoft Dynamics 365 program led by a large implementation partner when the schedule stopped holding. The IT business office wanted someone independent of the partner, with experience running large ERP programs, to reset the methodology and plan and to re-engage the functional teams. John Hannan LLC was engaged as program leader in early 2026, starting part-time and growing to a full-time role with additional consultants within two months.
The situation
The program had the ingredients of a good implementation: an executive sponsor, a capable IT business office, an experienced partner, a defined platform. What it lacked was a plan the business believed in. Milestones had slipped, the partner was proposing a methodology reset, functional teams had disengaged, and leadership could not see clearly what was done, what was next or what it would take.
The ask was specific: look at the partner's proposed reset from a process-based standpoint, tell us whether it is on the right track, help us align the project-plan methodology, and flag the red flags we cannot see from inside.
What we did
The first days were spent on six questions: the detailed history and work completed to date, the next milestone and how the program was tracking to it, the internal team mapped against the roles a program of this size needs, the partner and ISV resources that actually appear each week, the systems of record for requirements, RAID and assigned work, and the meeting cadences and groups already in place.
From there:
We joined the partner's recovery-planning sessions and reviewed its proposed structure and methodology, including the move to waterfall-based milestones, and gave leadership an independent read.
We rebuilt the plan around a store-level guiding-principles document the client already had, so that scope decisions could be tested against something written down.
We stood up governance: a RAID log the whole program used, a decision-owner map, weekly status the sponsor could read in five minutes, and an escalation path.
As the program stabilized, the role widened: a seven-week diagnostic of the enterprise-wide "one ERP" direction, covering functional scope, reporting and integration strategy, phasing and resourcing, and the commercial assumptions behind the next implementation statement of work, culminating in an on-site leadership readout.
A parallel human-capital-management system selection is now under way with the same steering structure.
The decision
Leadership chose to keep the platform and the partner and to change how the program was run. That is usually the right call: the cost of a restart is rarely justified by the problems a reset can fix.
What changed
Within a quarter the program had a plan the business recognized, functional teams re-engaged around named business-process owners, and a sponsor who could answer "where are we" from a single page. The client's own project managers now run the day-to-day with John Hannan LLC as program leader and advisor, which is the model we prefer: build the client's capability rather than replace it.
If your program looks like this, talk to John about your ERP program.
