Most enterprise SAP and Kinaxis projects do not fail loudly. They stall quietly. By the time it shows up on a status report, you have already lost a quarter.
After years of being brought in to reset programs that drifted, I have learned the warning signs are almost always there weeks before anyone says the word "delayed." Here are the three I watch for.
1. The status is always green, but the dates keep moving. When every update says on track and the go-live date quietly slips a week at a time, the reporting has become theater. Healthy projects surface problems early. Stalled ones hide them until they cannot.
2. Decisions get made in the meeting, then unmade in the hallway. If the same design questions keep reopening, you do not have a technical problem. You have an ownership problem. Nobody in the room has the authority, or the depth, to make the call stick.
3. The team is busy, but nobody can tell you what "done" looks like. Activity is not progress. When people are heads-down but the definition of done keeps shifting, the project has lost its spine.
None of these are technology problems. They are judgment and ownership problems. They are fixable, but only if someone catches them early and is willing to say so out loud.
If any of this sounds like a program you are running right now, take the Project Health Self-Assessment. Worst case, you get a second set of eyes from someone who has seen it before.