It's Good to Be Back

I know I’ve been lax about posting these past months. The key reason is that I took on a twelve week, Monday to Friday project helping a client in Montreal architect and plan an elaborate Center of Excellence (in partnership with CGI). I had not taken on a full-time twelve week project in twenty-five years and found the experience thrilling and overwhelming; thrilling because it was ultimately very successful and I learned volumes more about Centers of Excellence (more to follow); overwhelming because I necessary had night and weekend work to keep up with other clients and interests.


Now that the project is ended, I am getting back up and out, beginning with a workshop this coming Tuesday in Calgary. The workshop title is taken from the subtitle of my book The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live and has been brilliantly organized by Paul Kurchina as the pilot to what we expect will be many more such workshops (we have Toronto and Ottawa somewhat in the works but I also have plans for Montreal, Atlanta, and Chicago down the line). Workshop content includes SAP Marital Counseling (addressing implementation failures), revitalizing the end user eco-system, value measurement, how to build a Center of Excellence, enlightened sourcing, and much more.

I did attend Sapphire for the nth time and got to hang with the ever-present Jon Reed (http://snipurl.com/27hp3f) while speaking on Centers of Excellence and how to build and sustain super user networks (with Julie Stokes of ASUG and Kerry Brown of SAP).

I plan on writing through the remainder of the summer. First up will be a pair of case studies. The first will cover a joint effort between me and Julies Stokes the head of training for Fluor Corporation by which we have rebuilt an SAP super user network. Julie and I presented at SAPPHIRE and actually attracted more than 170 people to our talk (credit Julie; she cuts a lot of ASUG ice). My second case study will cover the project that I just completed.

While I have been silent regarding this blog, there has been no silence whatsoever in regard to my posting “IT, Your 15 Years Are Up” from last April. http://snipurl.com/27om3t Beyond the case studies, I plan on pushing the notions embedded in this posting quite a bit further.

At any rate, hello again to all. It’s good to be back.