An 86-carat diamond passes through the hands of thieves, gangsters, a bookie, a boxer and a dog, and nobody is ever quite in control of it. Guy Ritchie's Snatch is a film about chaos, and an uncomfortably accurate picture of what happens to data, decisions and deals on an ERP project when nobody owns them.
In Snatch, a stolen diamond goes on a tour of London's underworld. It's lifted in Antwerp, carried to London, lost in a bookies' robbery, chased by Russians, a gangster from New York, a hard man with a fondness for his gun, and finally swallowed by a dog with a squeaky toy. Everyone thinks they're in control. Nobody is.
It's a comedy, but if you've ever watched data move through a business with no owner, or sat in a project where everyone is making their own side deals, it may feel more like a documentary. Here's what Snatch has to say about running a Business Central project.
The diamond changes hands a dozen times, and every time someone new has it, they have their own plan for it. Nobody knows where it is at any given moment.
For your project: that's your data. A customer record starts in the CRM, gets copied to the web shop, re-keyed into the old ERP, exported to a spreadsheet for credit control and emailed to the accountant. Each copy drifts. When you migrate, the first question isn't "how do we move it", it's "which version is the real one, and who owns it?". Name a data owner for every master record before you load a single row. (See the data migration nobody wants to do.)
Mickey, the bare-knuckle boxer, speaks so fast in such a thick accent that nobody, including the audience, can follow him. Deals get done and nobody's sure what was agreed.
For your project: every ERP project has two languages. Finance speaks accruals, reconciliations and month-end. Developers speak tables, events and extensions. If nobody translates, both sides nod in workshops and walk away with different ideas of what was agreed. That's the functional consultant's job: to speak both languages and write down what was actually decided, in words both sides can read. (See who talks to whom.)
Turkish and Tommy go to buy a caravan from the travellers. What they drive away with isn't quite what they thought they were paying for, and the deal costs them a great deal more than the price of a caravan.
For your project: that's buying software or services without inspecting them. The licence quote that didn't mention the Premium requirement for one manufacturing user. The fixed price that excluded data migration. The partner whose "senior team" turned out to be someone else. Read the contract, check the licence mix, ask for references, and look inside the caravan before you hand over the cash. (See what a project actually costs and partner due diligence.)
The fight is supposed to be fixed. Mickey is supposed to go down in the fourth. Everyone with money on it is relying on him to follow the script. He doesn't.
For your project: plans that depend on people doing exactly what you assumed they'd do are fragile. The super user who was supposed to be available for UAT gets pulled onto month-end. The supplier who was supposed to send the EDI test file by Friday doesn't. Build the plan around commitments people have actually made, check them weekly, and have a fallback for the ones that slip.
By the end, the most valuable thing in the film is inside a dog that also swallowed a squeaky toy. The fortune is hidden in the least important-looking place imaginable.
For your project: the critical business process is often hiding somewhere trivial: a tiny customisation nobody remembers, a macro in a spreadsheet on one person's desktop, a scheduled report someone emails to the warehouse every morning. If you retire it without knowing what it does, something important stops. Inventory everything, however small, before you switch the old system off. (See old customisations.)
In one of the film's best scenes, the hard man realises the robbers pointing guns at him are carrying replicas, while his is very real.
For your project: demos are replicas. They run on clean demo data, with the happy path rehearsed and none of your exceptions. They look exactly like the real thing until someone checks. Before you sign, ask to see your own processes on your own data, or at least on data that looks like yours, including the awkward cases. (See use a sandbox.)
Vinny, Sol and Tyrone rob a bookmaker's with no real plan, a getaway driver who can barely fit through the window, and no idea what they're actually stealing.
For your project: casting matters. The right people in the right roles, chosen for what the job needs rather than who was free that week. A project team assembled from whoever was available is a crew that gets stuck in the window. (See the right project team.)
When things start going wrong, Avi flies over from New York to sort it out personally, and finds the situation is far worse than anyone had told him.
For your project: if the first time your sponsor or the partner's director gets involved is when it's already a crisis, the reporting has failed. Escalate early and honestly, while there's still time to fix things without a transatlantic flight. (See you can't handle the truth.)
That's the real question in Snatch, and the answer is: nobody, which is why it's chaos. On a Business Central project, the answer has to be clear. An owner for every piece of data. A translator between finance and development. Contracts read before they're signed. Plans built on real commitments. Every small process found before it's lost. Demos tested against reality. The right crew in the right roles. And bad news sent up early.
Do that, and your diamond ends up in the vault, not inside the dog.
Want someone to help you take control of your project before it turns into a Guy Ritchie film? Book a 30-minute call.
