Seven Tips to ensure you are hired in the Right SAP Project
As response to Jarret’s article “Seven Tips to ensure you hire the Right SAP Consultant”, I recommend consultants also to ask the right questions before entering a project. A project might be a failure before even started or you might enter in a phase where there is practically not much more work than to clean up the mess.
So when being interviewed for a project, here are some question you could ask:
1) What kind of project is it? Get to know the objectives and the mandate of the project. Who is the project owner, and how is the project backed up by the top management of the enterprise. Is there a business case for the project? Are potential risks analyzed?
2) What is the scope of the project. Find out if there is a clear scope, and if this is described in a Business blueprint or a contract. Ask If the project uses agile methodology or traditional (like ASAP or ASAP focus). If Agile, get to know how this is planned. If no proper plan is set up, this can be a sign of bad project management.
3) What is the time line of the project? Get the milestones and phases, with deadlines. If no proper plan exist, ask why, and if we are supposed to work without proper planning.
4) If allready started, is the project on track? If any delays, aks for the reasons, and find out if there are any conflicts between provider and client.
5) Who am I going to work with? Tell me who you work with and I can tell you who you are. Your performance is also a result of your co-workers and manager’s performance. Find out if you will work with juniors, seniors, and from where they are hired. Find the blend of technical and business skills in the project.
6) What will be your project role? If technical, check that you will not be working with out-dated methodology and techniques. If functional, make sure you wil be set up in team with the business experts on the client side.
7) How is the infrastructure of the project? Do we have network, development systems, basis support? How are transport system, Solution Manager and test tools being set up? Identify as many issues as possible. If many, it might be a project ready for failure.
After the interview, if they offer you a contract, try also to get in touch with any project members before accepting. Ask them questions about how the project is, and if the client seems happy. Check also the client’s reputation and financial situation.
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SAP at Telenor
I started working with SAP at Telenor, and I have allways kept a foot within the company, making a new interface,
helping solving issues and keeping the SAP HR up running. It’s getting close to the end of my engagement, so it is a little bit strange. The SAP community owes a lot to Telenor for beeing an early SAP HR customer in Norway. Telenor was one of the first to go live with Norwegian Payroll, developed by consultants at CAP Gemini, some of them now Sariba employees.
Oracle-SAP-integration
The last year I worked on integrating SAP Payroll with Oracle Applications, and I got to know some great consultants from Tata Consultant Services(TCS).
Corporate Social Responsibility with SAP HR
Corporate Social Responsibility reporting is a must for companies who want to attract the best of talent. It is quiet clear that intelligent and responsible people are likely to look for jobs in companies with the best reputation, at least within the industry sector they are working in.
Social Responsibility Reporting Framework
The Corporate Social Responsibility reporting framework was developed by The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The framework’s Social Performance Indicators are divided into six areas:
- Human Rights Indicators
- Labor Practices Decent Work Indicators
- Product Responsibility Indicators
- Society Indicators
- Environment Indicators
- Economic Indicators
How HR professionals and HR ERP consultants can contribute
IF we look closer at the second group of Social Responsibility Indicators, we can quickly help to configure SAP HR and SAP EHS to handle input and reports of these data.
Employment
- Total workforce by employment type, employment contract, and region
- Total number and rate of employee turnover by age group, gender, and region.
- Benefits provided to full-time employees that are not provided to temporary or part-time employees, by major operations.
Labor/ Management Relations
- Percentage of employees covered by collective bargaining agreements.
- Minimum notice period(s) regarding significant operational changes, including whether it is specified in collective agreements.
Occupational Health and Safety
- Percentage of total workforce represented in formal joint management-worker health and safety committees that help monitor and advise on occupational health and safety programs
- Rates of injury, occupational diseases, lost days, and absenteeism, and total number of work-related fatalities by region
- Education, training, counseling, prevention, and risk-control programs in place to assist workforce members, their families, or community members regarding serious diseases
Training and Education
- Average hours of training per year per employee by employee category
- Programs for skills management and lifelong learning that support the continued employability of employees and assist them in managing career endings
- Percentage of employees receiving regular performance and career development reviews
Diversity and Equal Opportunity
- Composition of governance bodies and breakdown of employees per category according to gender, age group, minority group membership, and other indicators of diversity
- Ratio of basic salary of men to women by employee category
The “reporting language” is XBRL which is well supported by SAP.
Posted in Human Development 1 Comment
Building social networks and collaboration with SAP and Adobe FLEX
Adobe’s project Cocomo allows users to create social network and collaboration features quickly with Flex builder. This includes
- VoIP Audio
- Webcam Video
- Chat
- Multi-User Whiteboards
- Real-Time File Sharing
- User Management
- Roles and Permissions
- Robust Data Messaging
With the new integration possibilities of FLEX applications (Flash Island) within SAP Web Dynpro , this looks very interesting. For the moment it is not possible to host your own Cocomo server within the enterprise, but probably Adobe will launch the server as an enterprise product later. In the meanwhile we can experiment with the design of our future collaboration environments at Adobe’s hosted site
Competence requirements for Job families
Working with HR technology and competence management can be quite puzzling. Just now I am trying to make a consistent model for training management, personnel development, recruiting and shift/crew planning.
All these processes are driven by the need for competence, so we will implement a system to help the organization to close the gap between their competence requirements and actual skills available.
Working with SAP ERP 6.0 as the back-end system, we have to figure out which objects to use for the competence requirements.
SAP’s Talent Management module introduces the Job Family object to group positions together. Job families are used in e-Recruiting and Succession planning for setting requirements for positions. But when we want to find a person among the personnel for a specific role in a crew for a specific project or operation, we need to specify on a more detailed level what the requirements for that role is. For this we cannot use the Job family.
The solution I propose is to use the Task object for this. This means that a position is described by a job family, but must also be able to fill different roles, i.e., execute tasks. The question now is if there should be a connection between the Job Family and the tasks, that a Job family can inherit can requirements from the tasks they are supposed to do.
In the end this is about modeling the business for sustainable quality of service with professionally trained personnel. Doing this right forms the basis of ISO certification of the enterprise.
Is the web positive or negative, good or bad?
Sometimes we should allow us to analyse the content of the web just for fun.. And maybe there are some hidden truths to be found? Well, 10 years ago I made an excel sheet which loaded the number of hits for various opposite words like yes/no and true/false to see if the world wide web is positive or negative and to see which search engine had the most positive sites indexed. I will post the results if I find the sheet. But still I get curious to see how this yes/no ratio has developed, so let’s use google trends this time and make our reflexions upon these results.
First we will have a look at how HR is doing compared to some other business activities:
HR vs. Finance vs. Sales
The HR-Finance-Sales ratio
Slightly closing the gap. Now let’s have fun:
Yes vs. No
yes-no ratio
I wonder why the word No is so dominating the word Yes?
Ok, let’s look further..
Good vs. Bad
The Good-Bad ratio
In this case “Good” is the winner, so the web is not so negative after all?
Let’s try some others:
Women vs. Men
The women-men ratio
Are we men getting more popular?
Travel vs. Jobs
Teh Travel-Jobs ratio
Are people looking for jobs rather than traveling?
USA vs. China vs. India
The USA-China-India ratio
India getting more popular
TV vs. PC vs. Mac
The TV-PC-Mac ratio
Surprised to see that people still prefer the good old TV?
Elvis vs. Beatles
The Elvis-Beatles ratio
Close race.
Now go ahead on your own. Research and analysis is fun..
Human Capital Management
Management of Employees, Human Resource Management, Human Capital Management. We are dealing with people as employees, resources or even capital. The word “capital” might have been added to get respect from the finance department and share holders.
Actually we love to work with HR because there is a human factor in what we do. Communication, collaboration, development, competencies, skills, performance, talent, and so on. Now let us look a little bit outside the business context and into some other areas of human life. This is simply done by elimination the word “capital” to get Human Management. But even management sounds too much like business, so let’s talk about human development.
Let’s look out and see, is there a way to put into system a competence management process to improve human development? What kind of competencies are required to handle a peace process? How could we build a social network platform to take care of the planet for the next generations? That is of course too complex to answer here, but we can start out by investigating how social networking and HR technology should be used to map the required competencies of the complex workforce planning that is needed to decrease poverty and other risks, and to increase health, safety and economic stability.
The main objective of a project like such must be based on reducing these risks, on increasing the ability to mobilize in case of crisis and to reduce the impact of any natural or crisis created by the mankind. To mobilize, methods from the defense must be used, but the main source of information must be recruiting and talent management systems where volunteers update their skills profile, contribution profile and availability in case of crisis. They could be sponsored by the enterprises they belong to, so that any absense might be justified when they are mobilized.
So this is a kind of Aid Program where people mainly contribute with their competency and time. Of course financial support will be involved as well, but that might be handled by the existing infrastructures. The main contribution from HR profesionals is to create a system to secure access to the right competence in any urgent situation, also in long term peace, environment or aid operations and projects.
Actually there is a big revolution going on on the net, and we must fight against the over-comercialization of these tendencies. So let’s do start a kind of LinkedIn with people connecting for other purposes that carreer or friend/family networking. This project will handle reference checks, and should have a more serious way of confirming actual competency involved than current carreer network sites. This will be done by some tutor based networking. Any volunteer is connected to a tutor with responsibility over a certain competence area or discipline. For each real world project a person gets recruited to, then this person’s experience profile gets updated with a new experience level and new adquired competencies are added to his/her competence profile.
So the concept is iterativ in the way that each approved NGO or aid organisation can recruit people through the portal if they take responsibility of acting as tutor and evaluation and approving the profile of the person recruited.
Time to get our hands dirty. Just contact me to join the project, get involved or add some ideas:
Posted in HR 2.0, Human Development Tagged Competence Management, HR 2.0, Human Development Leave a comment
Connecting ERP and HR processes with Social Networking
The Web 2.0 collaboration paradigm has now finally reached the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market vendors and buyers. It will probably shake up a lot of the industry.
We will not only see that existing ERP solutions need to change, but the business processes will have to be re-designed as well. The problem here is that ERP vendors and buyers move so slow that they might miss the whole revolution, and get stuck in the old paradigm. Then their share-owners decide to tear down the whole thing and buy up some web 2.0 platforms and build new solutions from scratch. This issue is critical for Talent Management and Learning Management solutions. The HR processes dealing with Competencies, Skills and Training as well as Recruiting, Career and Succession Planning will be affected by this new way of work to the point that they will be forced to incorporate social networking.
What has been going on the last few years has been to enable the use of blogs, wikis, tagging and publishing profiles inside the corporate intranet. This immediately creates a new marketplace for internal recruiting and profiling. This will evolve into an online community without the traditional top-down control of information we are used to with ERP and older intranet portals. The users will define the structures and relationships of the system. Any enterprise entity such as employee, team, competence area, department or business unit will have their own online space, creating a much more transparent organization than before. Each competence area will have a wiki entry and members and collaborators will contribute to it’s content.
Now we want to apply some old fashion business process architecture, and we get Service Oriented Architecture. The new mantra in the IT industry is the thrilling combination of Web 2.0 and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Luckily SAP and other ERP vendors have been working with SOA for a long time, enabling their business process driven applications. This might be their salvation and the way forward is not to turn ERP applications to web 2.0 solutions, but to get most out of both worlds through SOA.
The ERP application is basicly role driven. A user gets a role and a responsability for the the quality of the data in the process. All business partners are given the right information accomplishing legal aspects . All of this well structured information will serve as perfect tags and search categories under the unstructured web 2.0 world. By creating this link it should be easy to navigate between these two worlds. And this link I promise you, will be designed and implemented for my clients in 2009.
Posted in HR 2.0 Tagged Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, HR 2.0, SOA, Social networking, Talent Management Leave a comment
SAP and InnoCentive – Wisdom of the crowds?
SAP has started a closer collaboration with the Innovation network site InnoCentive.
The recent Harvard Business Review article “Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?” by Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti brings up the question if an enterprise should base its innovation on open or closed networks. Clearly SAP is now opening up. First by introducing SAP Developer Network, turning it into SAP Community Network for consultants and clients, with an incredible large number of participants and contributers in support of SAP’s NetWeaver platform and Business Solutions. And now by creating Innocentive.com, a Innovation mall where anyone can propose solutions to SAP’s posted challenge.
SAP has a long tradition for allowing partners to certificate add-ons and 3rd party SAP certified products. Many of these have been recently made available in SAP’s EcoHub. But this is the first time SAP really goes for the wisdom of the crowds.
So what’s in it for me as a contributor? Of course, I could win the price, some money, attractive would be to obtain a role on the development process during the accomplishment of the proposed solution.
I was really tempted to contribute to the campaign “Social Networking for Enterprise Applications“, as I am working with integrating SAP Competence Management with Microsoft Sharepoint to build a professional network platform for my clients. But I signed up too late to get seriously involved. The question is also if SAP have to select one solution and forget the others? Or do they have the rights to use any of these proposed solutions without compensating the contributor? Anyway, I am looking forward to see the result of the campaign in the next generation of SAP’s business applications.
Ideas are for free, but to turn them into profitable business requires real innovation and real investment.