Aligning your desires with your ability to satisfy them is a tricky thing for both people and firms. I want to lose 10 pounds, but I'm not quite willing (yet) to get up earlier every day to burn it off through exercise or rearrange my day to make it happen. My inner-geek really wants to dig into more of the technical details of programming with HANA Cloud Platform and all that new stuff, but not so much that I free up time and resources to go get the training.
Firms are just big collections of people. They want to have a stellar HCM tech project but not enough to fund and staff it properly. They want to roll-out new functionality to improve user productivity but aren't always willing to invest in the training that goes along with that.
People and firms both have a tendency to want more than what they are willing to work for, to invest in. It's just human nature. I firmly believe that one of the most important jobs a consultant has is to help clients understand the reality of what they are willing to do for what they will get. Align desires with capabilities - what are you willing to do for what you want to get, or what are you willing to get for what you are willing to do? Lots of times I say that we have to 'get real' and 'set realistic expectations.' And it's not always a pleasant exercise either for us or the client.*
For example - software vendors are great at promising clients something for nothing, or for very little. This is part of the hype-cycle, part of the excitement software vendors generate to compete and sell their products. It's just how the business works - if SAP was the only one setting realistic expectations for software and implementation activities, they wouldn't sell nearly as much. Consulting firms are also guilty of this - in this case, selling methodologies and cheaper off-shore (or imported off-shore) labor to reduce rates. My firm once lost an RFP because we aligned the client's desires to what was needed to achieve it: we bid much higher than the firm we lost to. And then about a year and a half later the client called us in to finish the project the other firm was unable to deliver on. That scenario has happened several times with various clients - it's far too common.
We work in a fairly efficient market - you generally get what you pay for. There are no meaningful shortcuts here; we're dealing with people for the most part, and people can only work so fast, learn so much and change at a certain pace. You thought your project was about HCM technology? Well yes, it is to a certain degree, but because we target that technology at people, your project is more about people than anything else. And we need people (yours and ours) to install the tech, to test it and make it work for you, to train people to use it and manage all the process change in the organization.
So let's get real - align expectations with capabilties and resources. You might not get what you wanted at first, but you will get what you can achieve.
* - I understand about 'stretch goals' too; good to have as long as we are not asking people to stretch too far, too long.