With pressure mounting to do more with less, how can you ensure you get maximum productivity from your SAP resources? Freya Purnell asks some experts for tips to get you moving in the right direction.
In these challenging economic times, you won’t find a CIO or IT manager complaining about being over-resourced and under-utilised. But whether you’re starting a project from scratch and assembling a ‘dream team’, looking to optimise your partner relationships, or simply keen to try a new approach to power through your projects, the insights of those who have been there, done that, can help to smooth the path to better performance.
Resourcing a greenfield project
Starting to build an SAP team and capability from scratch offers the opportunity to begin with a blank piece of paper and start writing a wishlist.That’s exactly what Fonterra Australia did when assembling their team for their business transformation program – Project Catalyst.
Andrew Faid, technical stream lead – ANZ transformation, Fonterra Australia, says they first hired an experienced and respected independent development lead – someone with a great reputation for delivery. Together they established what they would need from a technical team – SAP professionals with high design standards, a commitment to quality, the ability to question rather than accept things on face value, and the right attitude.
“The key thing when you are starting from scratch is to establish the rules of engagement and the technical standards. If you compromise on the standards upfront, you will never ever get them back,” Faid says. They then put together a list of names, and then set about attracting those people to the team, using recruitment companies only for the mechanics of hiring, rather than actually sourcing candidates.
With most companies hiring a systems integrator to work on large projects, another challenge is getting the mix o resources right and finding the most effective model to utilise those resources.
“One of the issues early on is that you will get told time and time again that the integrators can do the whole thing,and you don’t need anybody,” Faid says.
Fonterra spoke to other companies using SAP and came up with a strategy for how they would use outsourced and offshored capability.
“Basically, we had a local team of guns, and they were responsible for the first-offs, one-offs and quality. They would establish the frameworks and the quality gates,” he says.
Recruiting a winning team: what to look for
When choosing members for a high-performing team, Brian Pereira, CEO of CN Group, which has most recently partnered with NSW Trade & Investment on its massive and closely-watched ERP consolidation project, says attitude is the most important ingredient. That encompasses individual attitude, their attitude towards working in a team, and their attitude towards the customer.
“Capability is the next area – the technical, functional or change management skills the person might need,” Pereira says.
Andrew Faid says while their primary consideration when recruiting members of the Fonterra SAP team was finding experts in the technology areas they were delivering, almost as important was their reputation and attitude. Actually verifying technical capability during the candidate screening process is critical, according to Faid.
“There are a lot of people out there in SAP who, for example, have done 15 years of ABAP. As a matter of fact, they have done one year of ABAP 15 times,” he says.
“So from a screening perspective, we werevery direct. In the interviews, we got stuck into full-on examples, and ‘how you would do this’,” Faid says.
Having a personal recommendation is another tried-and-tested way to ensure your newly recruited star performer can actually deliver the goods.
“From a consulting perspective, we use people that we’ve used before and that come with a great reputation. We know their personalities, we know that they can actually get a job done,” says Pereira.
“Everybody who joined our project, with probably three exceptions, was vouched for by somebody who was already on the team,” Faid says.
Being confident in hiring decisions means you can avoid regrets down the track.
“Don’t hire the wrong person because you feel you should, or are expected to hire them. If they are not the right person, just move on and hire someone else,” Faid says.
With an offshore team in Manila, provided by the systems integrator, two factors were crucial to the success of the working relationship between the teams. Fonterra had some members of the offshore team located with the onshore team, and appointed one of these resources as the offshore-onshore lead.
“That person managed the offshore team, and dealt with culture, communication and workload,” Faid says.
Setting the foundations
Once you have the resources in place, getting the groundwork right can make a huge difference to how teams work together and projects proceed.
“Very early on, we established a development process and a quality guide, so there was no ambiguity about expectations,” Faid says.
With these guidelines in place, the first QA checks and code reviews in the Catalyst program were “brutal”.
“We almost had people weeping, but we had to get them over the fact that it wasn’t about their personality, it was about the quality of the product that was going into the solution,” he says.
Particularly when working with offshore resources, having these very clear guidelines and expectations is crucial.
“If you have any ambiguity or if there are any concerns around the quality of your functional specs, you have got to make sure that you have those lines of communication working very, very well,” Faid says.
Establishing strong relationships between teams is another success factor – whether that is between a consulting and customer team, or technical and functional teams.Pereira says the role of the customer cannot be overlooked in ensuring high-quality project delivery.
“Their ability to actually understand their business process, understanding what the change will do in the business – both positively and negatively, and understanding who their supporters are, is critical to the success of an overall project team,” he says.
With projects often on much shorter timeframes, particularly with cloud-based deployments, which may take 3-4 months instead of 12-18 months, the pressure is on to get the team dynamic working fast.
“The shorter the time frame, the less time you have to build complex working relationships. If you are bringing the two teams together – the consulting side and the customer side – you want them to get through their learning cycles fairly quickly, solving problems and performing,” Pereira says.
Similarly, the technical and functional specialists need to be working well together to deliver good results. Faid says during the design and build phase of their project, they allocated technical resources to particular areas, such as finance, so that if the functional specialists had questions, they had a go-to person.
“A lot of times it does come down to the relationships– you almost embed the developers with the functionalteams ,” he says.
As the project progresses, having technical resources who are prepared to challenge the thinking of functional specialists to keep the implementation on track in terms of the business outcomes is also important, but that can be quite confronting for the functional team.
“That’s why it’s so important to build the relationship.Invest the time to get the functional guys and the technical guys to be working lock-step,” Faid says.
As the project transitions into the business-as-usual phase, this extends to having the development and support teams share knowledge, and communicate what is expected from a quality perspective, to ensure the standards set upfront continue to be upheld as the system matures.
Maximising productivity with the right project methodology
What if you were able to double the productivity of your SAP team? Jason Fair, CEO of US-based Genesis Consulting, has seen it happen with the right project methodology.
Having chalked up many years experience implementing SAP solutions, both on the customer side and as aconsultant, Fair became frustrated with the way large ERP programs were being managed and the results they were delivering. He began to create a framework using the Lean and Agile principles often used in custom application development projects, but less often in ERP.
“Studies have shown that we actually only spend anywhere from 5 to 30 per cent of our daily activity on customer value-add activities. If I can add another 20 or 30per cent, I double my capacity at which my team is building the product,” Fair says.
To apply these principles, firstly, the team needs to adopt a different way of thinking. The key concepts of the Lean approach are looking at how to eliminate waste, how to increase customer value-add activity, and how to eliminate non-value add activity. The Agile methodology then requires the creation of smaller batches of work that can be delivered in shorter periods of time.
“Instead of looking at milestones like the end of a blueprint or the end of realisation or the end of final prep,we need to break that down into two- or three-week increments,” Fair says. “You have to ask your team what it is that you can build in two or three weeks of time, build that and then demonstrate it to your customer.”
Delivery of these batches of work also enables what Fair calls ‘iterative prototyping’, where the customer provides feedback at every stage of development.
“Working side by side with the customer, we are constantly building a product that is meeting the customer’s needs, and it works in the environment that we have. It’s also based on prioritised capabilities and functionality that the end customers want.”
This approach also allows project teams to bypass long and involved blueprinting efforts.
“[Typically] only 40 to 50 per cent of that blueprint is ever actually realised. So rather than sitting around building a 200-page document, let’s build [the solution]and have our customers react to it,” Fair says. “That prototyping experience is much more effective in prioritising our work, getting a product that’s higher quality, and getting higher customer satisfaction at the end of the process.”
While Fair admits this type of approach requires the right organisational champions and a culture that can accept change, the rewards are significant, with teams who adopt it becoming “hyperproductive”.
“When you start to eliminate where you see the roadblocks or obstacles and you enable your team to make decisions, to be able to move forward quicker, to be able to design things faster, and you streamline that process, it’s just so amazing to see the productivity that then starts to happen,” he says.
On one of Genesis’ projects with a customer, the SAP team had a portfolio of 10 projects it wanted to undertake,but the available resources only allowed for the funding of three or four of those projects. The Lean and Agile implementation almost doubled the team’s productivity, allowing them to pull two more projects into the year that they would otherwise have been unable to undertake, Fair says.
“The cash savings associated with those two projects was $10 million, that they can now redirect back into other programs. This approach can lead to bottomline savings and an ROI that you may not have been anticipating before.”
This article was first published in the Inside SAP Yearbook 2014.
