¿How hard is to start a new Enterprise Application?

On the last days I have been working on a big enterprise project. As part of my professional assignments are the Software architecture and Project management activities. I came to the project three months later the Project's starting point. Like any computer geeker ;) I supposed that all project's planning and scoping have been established without problem but it's not true.

Therefore, I tried to find out the causes of this situation but I couldn't find any valid answer... So I decided to identify the issues that fired those project's anormal situations. Some of them are described below:

- Lacks of project's Scope Definitions.
- Too much methodology guides to manage and control the project but nothing related to project execution.
- Bigger promises from the vendors technical plataforms but smaller realities from them.
- Lacks of the business specifications (Business process specications and use cases)
- Many non-validated expectations from the management team on the capabilities of SOA architectural approach and J2EE Platforms.