Change requests are not a project risk. They're proof the scope was wrong from the start.
The original sin of SAP consulting.
Every SAP migration follows the same ritual. A team arrives for a discovery workshop. They conduct interviews, observe processes, fill out spreadsheets, and return weeks later with a proposal. The proposal is a document built from what people said — not from what the system actually contains. It's presented as a scope. It's actually a best guess.
The gap between what was said and what is.
SAP systems carry 20 years of decisions. Customizations layered on customizations. Integrations that no one documented. Data models that evolved with the business without a single record of why. No amount of interviewing surfaces all of it. The people being interviewed don't know all of it. The gap between the proposed scope and the real system is where change requests live.
Change requests are a symptom, not a cause.
The consulting industry has optimized for managing change requests — better templates, clearer contracts, faster approval processes. This is the wrong problem to solve. Change requests aren't a project management failure. They're evidence that the starting point was wrong. You can't manage your way out of a flawed foundation.
ConsultAI™: a different starting point.
We built Talra to solve the root cause. Before writing a single line of proposal, we request read-only API access to your SAP system. Talra connects via OData and reads the actual data: customizations, open transports, data volumes, integration dependencies, active configurations. The scope document we produce reflects what your system actually contains — not what someone believes it contains.
What happens to change requests.
When the scope is built from real data, the gap closes. Not because we're better at estimating — because we're not estimating. We're measuring. Change requests don't get managed. They become structurally impossible. The scope is the system. The system is the scope.
We didn't reduce change requests. We made them irrelevant.