It’s Getting Ugly (Again)

Who to Believe?

InformationWeek.com, USA / Internet - September 01, 2009 An SAP official said Tuesday that 30,000 job openings exist worldwide for SAP consultants to support the needs of the company's 82,000 customers and their 12 million users across the globe.

Ray Wang, http://blog.softwareinsider.org/ Superstar Industry Analyst most recently from Forrester: September 3, 2009: Rwang0RT @sapwhisperer: I have never seen this many SAP consultants looking for work! It’s Crazy

Believe both, actually. Simply note that very few of those 30,000 job openings exist in the United States. Consultants are lacking in South America, Africa, and APAC (giving credence to this SAP official) but not (except for exceptional skills) in the United States (so believe Ray as well).

As for the oft-expressed "shortage of SAP consultants", go to the most informed source, Jon Reed, for the real skinny: http://snipurl.com/rm2sm

His conclusion: "Solving the SAP skills shortage" is a discussion that has been pretty much non-stop ever since I joined the SAP marketplace in 1995, with the exception of a brief break around 2000/2001. It’s a valuable discussion, one that all parties in the SAP world have a responsibility to come together and address. I do believe, however, that we need to move beyond generic and breathless assumptions about the nature of this shortage in order to solve it.

The Return of SAP SI Highjinks

In the wake of the economic downturn, new licenses in the U.S. are way down and likely to stay down for some time to come. This puts pressure on all the SAP consultants, whether they are coming from major systems integrators like Accenture, IBM, and Deloitte, or from boutique SAP firms, or as independents. The result should be that we are now in a buyer’s market. The last time we had such a market was 2000-2003 and my observation at the time was that it was having a positive effect on the quality of SAP consulting (increased pressure to retain client confidence in the face of client scarcity). I was so confident of this that I amended my chapter on consulting in The SAP Blue Book, A Concise Business Guide to the World of SAP, from “The Wild West of SAP Consulting” to “The Once Wild West of SAP Consulting”.

I have no new data, only a growing handful of recent stories and corresponding input from my network of SAP-watchers. What the evidence is telling me is that things are getting ugly out there all over again.

Below is text that I retired from The Blue Book in 2005, some of which is, unfortunately, needed anew:

“All the same, some consulting firms in high-demand areas (SAP, Supply Chain, Customer Relationship Management, Internet et al) still play some of these age-old tricks and it is in your interest to have your antenna fully extended.

Bait and switch: A firm bidding to become a client's implementation partner promotes star consultants during the proposal phase and sends inferior consultants once the deal is set.

Flooding the zone: A firm assigns one or two star consultants to a project and surrounds them with an army of neophyte consultants whose SAP experience can be measured in weeks. It takes a while for the client to recognize this because at the onset of a project, neophytes seem to know so much more than the client, but mostly they are hiding behind a terminology smoke-screen.

Gin rummy (spades) : A haves-and-needs body shopper sends a subcontract consultant to a client; some time later, the body shopper finds a cheaper consultant for the same job and, through some pretext, replaces the first one for greater personal profit.

Gin rummy (clubs): A contract consultant accepts a six-month assignment. Two months into the job, the consultant finds another assignment that pays more. Citing 'philosophical differences', he/she abandons the first client in mid-project.

Casper Consulting, Inc.: Resumes of non-existent consultants are presented to clients to puff up the size of a consulting roster. Not so curiously, these consultants are always 'on another assignment'.

Sap, not SAP: Resumes are sprinkled with SAP initials like SD, MM, or PP but the candidate has no real SAP experience. This gambit was once widespread but is happily on the wane. It has now been a full three years since a candidate once called me and opened his spiel by saying that he had three years of sap experience. That's what he said, sap (rhymes with zap), not SAP. Imagine the resonance of a phone slamming onto its receiver.

Facing Mirrors(((()))): There are great numbers of contract consultants who cut subcontract representation deals with more than one consulting firm and thus appear on several firms' rosters. These consultants are only slightly more available than those from Casper Consulting, Inc.”
…

The two tricks I am seeing the most of are Bait and Switch and Flooding the Zone. No need to name names because most of the players are guilty to some degree or another.

What to Do About This Ugly State of Affairs

I have long espoused the need for reliable certification. Much has been made through the years regarding the certification of individual consultants and although the methods deployed have huge flaws (mostly testing their knowledge of SAP technology but not their consulting skills), I still agree that the exercise has merit.

However, most clients hire in SAP consulting firms and SAP applies partnership status to these firms, platinum, gold, etc. (Unfortunately these status levels have nothing to do with the relative field performance of these firms, merely their size and geographic reach. Thus, the firm that I recently lauded -itelligence, for its excellent SAP support services- has a lesser “partner status” than does Accenture.)

Company certification would best be provided not by SAP but by a reputable third-party firm (and clearly one that does not also provide SAP systems integration). Such a firm would be charged with post-implementation reviews of a select percentage of all of a providers’ engagements and certification would center upon a) Adherence to Established Methods and Best SAP Practices, b) the Level of SAP Skills as deployed during the project, c) the Level of Consulting Skills as deployed during the project, and d) Adherence to Time & Cost limitations.

Even better than one reputable third-party firm would be a consortium of individuals and small firms. Think Circuit Court judges.

A client recently asked me, “Are any of these firms really better than the others?” He had recently completed an SAP SI selection process and found that he could barely distinguish the three candidate firms. Once his project got started, results were mixed. His U.S. staff is pleased with the SI performance. His European staff has already tossed the SI in favor of a collection of hand-picked independent consultants formed into a project team.

No company certification exists for SAP SI’s and I see no movement on the part of SAP in this direction. While there is a considerable body of understanding at SAP in regard to quality services, there remains at the core of the organization a fixation on the software aspects of SAP endeavors rather than the organizational and change management aspects. In my many discussions with SAP higher-ups through the years, my nudging (and occasional shoving) are answered with solutions that tend to lead to more software or middleware or architectural changes. Systems integration partners are viewed as enablers and sources of business, not as the guardians of client satisfaction and the purveyors of SAP knowledge transfer. The nudge of this blog posting will change nothing in that regard.

Therefore, clients are again doubly advised to engage a third party for engagement assurance (also known as delivery assurance or quality assurance). For more on this subject, please see a previous post: http://snipurl.com/rlwo1.

Postscript: It is official. My anonymous blogger friend at http://sapmesideways.blogspot.com/ had this add-on following our e-mail exchange in regard to whether or not his firm’s systems integrator was following an implementation methodology:

“A couple of weeks ago, I had some contact with a guy that has been in consulting for a long time – he was kind enough to say some goods things about my writing, so I’ve decided to return the favor. Catch his blog here: http://sapsearchlight.blogspot.com/One thing that I did find of interest; he referred to a process of project management that is supposed to be used by the consultants – ASAP (AcceleratedSAP I believe it stands for) also known more recently as Focus ASAP / ASAP Focus depending on where you get your info.

He said “Outside of IBM and Accenture, all certified partners MUST adhere to SAP’s ASAP methodology, sometimes referred to (recently) as Focus ASAP. Most of these partners add some of their secret sauce to the core SAP methodology. I am willing to bet that if you look at this firm’s proposal of services to you that they make a big deal about their methodology.”

I did actually look thru all of the paperwork from these consultants – nowhere does it a make a mention of this. I asked around our project team to see if anyone had heard it cited, and the general answer was a definite “No” – apart from one person who remembered reading a reference to “Focus ASAP” in one of the SAPpress books that we bought a ways back. So I then thought I’d ask their Project Manager – unfortunately, he’s “not available” at the moment (I don’t know why) and we are not sure when we will next see him.

I approached one of the other consulting staff and asked the question – the response was along the lines of “Oh that was used about 10 years ago, but no-one uses that anymore, it’s a really horrible system”. Interesting?”

OK. SO the Focus ASAP methodology is “a really horrible system”. Let’s just make it up as we go.