It's nigh impossible to understand the thinking at SAP that resulted in Condoleezza Rice speaking at their recent event in San Jose, CA.
http://snipurl.com/s2cw9
Through the years, at a multitude of SAP events, there has been a great diversity of speakers but none, to my recollection, with a record of continuous abject failure and ignominy in a global political arena.
Money quote after the event from Ms. Rice: "Now I can wake up in the morning and read the newspaper and not feel like I have to do something about what's in it."
Keep reading. Stay home.
As for SAP, I can only hope they don't tap Dick Cheney as a Sapphire keynoter on the subject of "Accelerated Intelligence Gathering."
SAP Searchlight Michael Doane
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Announcing The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live
In 1998, I published the first edition of The SAP Blue Book, a Concise Business Guide to the World of SAP. At that time, there were very few books about SAP and none that covered the basics of SAP best practices. The book has been revised five times since then and, since it helps to de-mystify SAP, it continues to sell quite well and its wide circulation has helped me to widen my network of contacts and to attract clients in need of SAP advisory.
On September 29, 2009, The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live will be available at http://www.michaeldoane.com/. A few weeks later, it will also be available through Amazon. My intended readership is anyone with a stake in post-implementation SAP success. To my knowledge, no other such book exists.
My initial intent was to write this book in 2001. However, once I began my research into the best practices for post SAP Go-Live, I realized that the vast population of firms with SAP software were still very immature in terms of their deployment. As such, proven best practices had not entirely emerged.
While the Blue Book was written for anyone who has a stake in its success, the accent is acquisition and implementation. The Green Book was written for firms that seek to get the most of out of their SAP investments through enlightened organizational structures and adherence to proven best practices.
In short, the Blue Book addresses an SAP wedding and this book addresses the SAP marriage.
In the chapters “SAP Marital Counseling”, I outline remedies for SAP deployment pain-points that result from “imperfect” implementations. Subsequent chapters provide guidance for rationally assessing your firm’s SAP maturity (from stable implementation through a thriving center of excellence), how to build and sustain a center of excellence, strategies and rationale for outsourcing non-strategic tasks such as help desk and Basis support. As one Basis guy was heard to mutter “maintenance blows.”
I provide a lengthy chapter on “Weathering a Global Fiscal Crisis with SAP” as well as guidance for “The Care and Nurturing of SAP End Users”. For the latter, as readers will note, I am somewhat obsessed since end user support is the most neglected arena in all of SAP-dom.
Clients who are weary of SAP sales pressures should benefit from “From Supplier to Advisor: A New Chair for SAP” and I further provide a short, cautionary chapter “Intelligent Business Intelligence”.
If the book had been written entirely from my viewpoint it would necessarily be somewhat suspect. There are no renaissance people in SAP and we are all necessarily somewhat specialized. I therefore tapped serious input from among a group of people I’ve worked with through the years:
Michael Connor is founder and CEO of Meridian Consulting (www. meridian-us.com) and a significant contributor to The New SAP Blue Book. We have been sharing intelligence and collaborating with clients since 1997.
Jon Reed has been advising clients and consultants for more than fifteen years and is now the recognized leader in the field of SAP career guidance. We have been working together in the SAP fields since 1995. His website is www.jonerp.com
Joshua Greenbaum is an independent industry analyst who writes for SAP publications and is a valued advisor to upper management at SAP, Oracle, and other enterprise applications software firms. His website is http://ematters.wordpress.com/
Mark Dendinger has led a number of successful SAP systems integration firms since 1995 and has extensive contacts with SAP America and a vast network of SAP consultants.
Kay Tailor is an accomplished SAP architect/technician who has been active in the SAP fields since the mid 1990’s.
Wade Walla is the founder of Group:Basis and has a considerable ability to demystify “the technical”. http://www.groupbasis.com
Dane Anderson has worked as an IT outsourcing provider and since 2003 has been a prominent industry analyst covering the IT services and outsourcing marketplace.
John Ziegler was one of the first group of non-European consultants at SAP America. He has managed dozens of SAP projects since 1992.
Bill Wood has spent fifteen years helping clients go live with SAP. His website is http://www.r3now.com
While the Blue Book was written for anyone who has a stake in its success, the accent is acquisition and implementation. The Green Book was written for firms that seek to get the most of out of their SAP investments through enlightened organizational structures and adherence to proven best practices.
In short, the Blue Book addresses an SAP wedding and this book addresses the SAP marriage.
In the chapters “SAP Marital Counseling”, I outline remedies for SAP deployment pain-points that result from “imperfect” implementations. Subsequent chapters provide guidance for rationally assessing your firm’s SAP maturity (from stable implementation through a thriving center of excellence), how to build and sustain a center of excellence, strategies and rationale for outsourcing non-strategic tasks such as help desk and Basis support. As one Basis guy was heard to mutter “maintenance blows.”
I provide a lengthy chapter on “Weathering a Global Fiscal Crisis with SAP” as well as guidance for “The Care and Nurturing of SAP End Users”. For the latter, as readers will note, I am somewhat obsessed since end user support is the most neglected arena in all of SAP-dom.
Clients who are weary of SAP sales pressures should benefit from “From Supplier to Advisor: A New Chair for SAP” and I further provide a short, cautionary chapter “Intelligent Business Intelligence”.
If the book had been written entirely from my viewpoint it would necessarily be somewhat suspect. There are no renaissance people in SAP and we are all necessarily somewhat specialized. I therefore tapped serious input from among a group of people I’ve worked with through the years:
Michael Connor is founder and CEO of Meridian Consulting (www. meridian-us.com) and a significant contributor to The New SAP Blue Book. We have been sharing intelligence and collaborating with clients since 1997.
Jon Reed has been advising clients and consultants for more than fifteen years and is now the recognized leader in the field of SAP career guidance. We have been working together in the SAP fields since 1995. His website is www.jonerp.com
Joshua Greenbaum is an independent industry analyst who writes for SAP publications and is a valued advisor to upper management at SAP, Oracle, and other enterprise applications software firms. His website is http://ematters.wordpress.com/
Mark Dendinger has led a number of successful SAP systems integration firms since 1995 and has extensive contacts with SAP America and a vast network of SAP consultants.
Kay Tailor is an accomplished SAP architect/technician who has been active in the SAP fields since the mid 1990’s.
Wade Walla is the founder of Group:Basis and has a considerable ability to demystify “the technical”. http://www.groupbasis.com
Dane Anderson has worked as an IT outsourcing provider and since 2003 has been a prominent industry analyst covering the IT services and outsourcing marketplace.
John Ziegler was one of the first group of non-European consultants at SAP America. He has managed dozens of SAP projects since 1992.
Bill Wood has spent fifteen years helping clients go live with SAP. His website is http://www.r3now.com
To order or just to have more information, follow this link to my website: http://www.michaeldoane.com
Friday, September 4, 2009
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.
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.
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