Abstract: The blog post gives an insight into the author’s personal development and the genesis of the tools he uses in project management. It shows how important it is to have a passion and interest in your field of work in order to develop innovative solutions.
In the following, I focus especially on the stages that were very essential for the accumulation and shaping of my methodological knowledge and the collection/development of the pragmatically applicable toolbox for successful project management that took place in the process.
THE FIRST STEPS
In 1992, I joined Andersen Consulting as an SAP consultant – at that time still using the R/2 version – and in 1994 I was one of the first consultants for SAP R/3 in Europe. That’s why I’m probably called a dinosaur in SAP consulting today ;-).
I learned SAP from scratch. I came to module consulting in RM/RV (in R/2) and MM/SD (in R/3) via programming and technical team management. As one of the first R/3 users in Europe, I was then on the road for Andersen in various projects for fire department operations and was thus able to get to know the SAP system end-to-end and with all its pitfalls at a very early stage.
SPIRIT OF FACILITATION
Fortunately (from today’s point of view), the people from Andersen Consulting were the method popes at that time with their “Method/SAP” implementation method. This helped me a lot – especially because I was able to see what you can do wrong if you don’t apply a method pragmatically enough and tailored to the respective project situation. At this point I would like to thank Rolf Moser, who awakened in me the “Spirit of Facilitation” for the goal-oriented and maximally beneficial use of methods and tools.
NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING
I took on my first SAP project management role in 1995, after moving to Origin. Interestingly enough, it was from an ex-Andersen who was not able to apply what he had learned at Andersen in a customer-specific enough way. In the context of this first project management I developed together with colleagues from all over Europe an SAP implementation method including the necessary tools and piloted it very successfully on my project; many thanks at this point to Helmut Weber (at that time customer project manager), a controller, who with his constant inquiries always drove me completely into the depths of the interrelationships of the method.
EVOLUTION
Unfortunately, this implementation method was not used soon after, because SAP AG, just when we were ready, had finished developing its own AcceleratedSAP (ASAP). Interestingly, ASAP was designed almost exactly like the method we had developed at Origin. And that was no wonder, because by now evolutionary prototyping had become the norm for an SAP implementation that needed to stay close to the standard. As a consequence, I got involved with ASAP and all the tools within it and got certified by SAP for the different ASAP variants (Single-Site, GlobalASAP and Continuous Business Improvement (CBI)). Along the way, I also got the certificate for SAP integration during this time, which was quite challenging because you had to be very knowledgeable about all the modules there as well as their integration with each other!
WHAT LASTS LONG …
Fittingly, I then took on one of my longest and most intensive project leads: the global template rollout to GlobalASAP for the CCHBC. This meant using ASAP from front to back, in every detail, step by step, and with intense discussion. Because CCHBC had also sent the two customer-side project managers on GlobalASAP courses, and so everything was discussed intensively and at length. Today, I think this helped us all a lot in our future professional lives. Thanks for this to Reinhard Meister and Kiril Topalov from CCHBC! From the cooperation in the first template (R/3 Core) we subsequently developed the specific, pragmatically applicable GlobalASAP template for the further SAP rollouts of CCHBC.
FURTHER STATIONS AND EXPERIENCES
In the meantime, I was consulting manager at PLAUT (Switzerland) AG. As such, I trained all my consultants in the technical basics for SAP consultants, because there were actually some who couldn’t read or debug ABAP and didn’t know the normal tools for SAP consultants: Database structures in SAP, ABAP/4 Query or the LSMW.
I would also like to mention that in 1999 I went to Switzerland for the then Schmidt, Vogel & Partner (today’s Itelligence and at that time always System House of the Year in Germany as the most successful system house for the midmarket) and founded and built up SVP (Schweiz) AG. In Switzerland, too, we succeeded in becoming the most successful midmarket system house and system house of the year in the very year we founded the company. At that time, we were helped by the SME packages defined by SAP (Switzerland) AG (SME = small and medium-sized enterprises) – overall SAP implementations with costs of between 150 and 250 man-days with detailed function lists and a week-by-week activity/effort plan – a wonderful toolbox from which I later benefited greatly.
METHODS PAY OFF
Using the experience gained from project management with ASAP and the SME packages as a basis, I then created a project management CD for my project managers and consultants at PLAUT. On this CD, the complete project cycle from bidding to project follow-up was presented in a very pragmatic and consistent manner in terms of content, quality, time, budget and communication, using simple tools and an accelerated ASAP version as a procedure. In the first few years, I have used this toolbox to clearly describe various SAP projects with little effort and to bring them to the finish line as fixed-price projects, controlled from the offer to the post-support phase, securely on budget, on quality and on time.
WHY NOT DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?
In particular, however, over the past ten years I have used my toolbox to restart, restructure and finish various SAP projects that were going wrong as project manager number 3, 4 or 5. What annoys me is that it could have been done right from the start and the customer could have saved the costs for the unsuccessful rounds. Not to mention that restarting the project the right way is much more time-consuming when everyone involved has already become so wonderfully accustomed to the freestyle approach (i.e. the absence of methods, tools and principles), and changing working methods to transition to orderly structures always means a severe culture shock for the project team.
IN ALL CONSISTENCY
In the course of all my projects, good tools that can be used pragmatically have been added to my toolbox over time, so that today it is complete.
Occasionally I am asked why some of these tools are still based on such outdated technologies as MS-Excel and why cloud applications are not used instead. The answer is simple: it doesn’t really matter which implementation method you follow in a project or which tools you use – the important thing is simply that you do it and do it consistently!
TWO INTERESTING EXPERIENCES:
The first: I was once part of the Program Mgt. of a worldwide SAP rollout project as Rollout Manager Central-Europe. The project had about 350 employees, and the PMO consisted of five people and issued new guidelines and formats for budget reporting on a weekly basis. This meant a sequence that made it impossible to be able to do the reporting in the right format because they were always starting from scratch. I told the PMO after the third change that I would stop reporting completely now and not resume it until we were actually reporting. After about three months, we did it for the first time – when, of course, everything had already gone off the rails globally!
The second experience is the report of a key user from a few weeks ago. When he saw that we wanted to do test scripts in Excel, he said that the system integrator had a “super great and fancy cloud solution” when they introduced SAP and that it was “really great”; however, after about four months they had completely lost track of their to-dos and OPs because this fancy cloud solution had been relatively complicated to maintain …
TOOLS: BETTER OLD THAN CHAOTIC
I prefer to have simple and – from the point of view of one or the other – perhaps “outdated” tools that everyone can use easily and where everyone involved can keep track of everything. Using these tools, I have so far demonstrably saved the customer at least twice the amount he paid me in fees for the system integrator involved in all the projects I have set up as the customer’s project manager – with the same or even better success in the SAP implementation. From your point of view, namely the customer’s point of view, I think this is a desirable result. I would like to show you and teach you how this can be done and how you can also achieve this in the context of this blog project.