Whittle Consulting Group

Have you experienced working with a leader who impresses you as someone who has achieved his/her leadership reputation through conscious actions, initiative, and personal strategy? What do you notice about this type of leader that is different from the leader who simply “fell into” the formal leadership role due to seniority or organizational politics? What is it like to work for (or with) a “conscious” leader?

This group will exchange best practices, tips, hints, and strategies for building and sustaining an organization that is truly “high performing.” To achieve this type of organization, I believe in individual accountability at all levels—from the CEO to the individual employee—regardless of rank, title, position, years of service, or role. Every employee in an organization has the potential—as well as the responsibility—to discover and become a leader.

Your leadership legacy: Will it be by design or by accident? Becoming a leader is a choice. All too often, our formal leaders have obtained their official roles “by accident”—they simply lived longer than anyone else and “earned” the role through seniority—or they were at the right place at the right time when a formal leadership role—complete with title—became available.

My soapbox: What if everyone in our organization explored their leadership potential and vision—and became leaders BY DESIGN—where you pursue your leadership goals through visioning, planning, and conscious actions.

This group is intended as a “Community of Practice” (Center of Excellence) for anyone who wishes to further explore the concepts of leadership within yourself (after all…it all starts with YOU!), your colleagues, and your team members. This conversation should not be restricted to those who are formally charged with “leading” others (e.g. manager, supervisor)…but rather everyone who believes that the individualized leadership is a dream worth pursuing—both on a personal as well as a professional level.

Dialogues can include (but will certainly not be restricted to) subjects like leadership, organizational change, communication, teamwork, workplace relationships, personal working styles, etc.

How do you currently stay in touch with your end users regarding their support needs? How do you REALLY know, from the perspective of the end users, that your current support program is working (or not!)? Share with us any formal or informal means by which you “stay in touch” with what’s happening in your end users’ world.

Whether you have an existing Super User program or are just starting to build one, the first question most people ask is “Where do I begin?” Too often, organizations jump immediately to the area that I recommend become one of the LAST areas to address, which is “structure.” (To whom will this program report? How many Super Users do I need? How will I need to reorganize people?)

Before you worry about these questions, start with a baseline assessment of your Current State of support. You need to answer the questions: “How do our end users obtain SAP support today? If they have a problem or question, what path do they follow to obtain help?”

Keep in mind that there will be multiple paths and channels used by your end users. Even within one department or group, employees will probably use several means of obtaining assistance. Don’t guess about this or base your assessment on heresay. Instead—go to the source by randomly interviewing various employees as well as managers and supervisors. You might want to “shadow” some of your employees to get a better sense of what a “day-in-the-life-of Tom End User” is really like.

It’s important that this not appear to be a witch hunt where you’re trying to identify “bad” behaviors. Instead, position this as a means of gathering knowledge about how things are being done today, with the intention of trying to find a way to make support easier for both the end users as well as your SAP team.

As you conduct these interviews, you will discover that some employees automatically walk down the hallway to “Joe” or “Mary”—and ask that individual. Others may call the Help Desk. There are those who will contact someone they know who is (or has been) on the SAP implementation team. Perhaps some employees actually use the documentation you provided them during training (Yes, I know…highly unusual—but once in awhile we luck out!). Some may choose to approach the manager or supervisor, perhaps not to get help as much as to whine for awhile…after which they decide they then need to find a source who can actually assist them. Bottom line: you want to get a clear picture of every possible way that your end users seek help today.

Physically, map out all of these avenues and paths that employees are currently taking. You can use software or paper—it doesn’t matter. What you need to produce are objective “snapshots” of today’s Current State of support that accurately reflect the various behaviors and patterns that  exist among your end users today. In addition, you will begin to uncover (if you don’t already know) attitudes and dispositions of your end users related to your systems and operations. This will be valuable information to apply to your change management strategies that you will develop as part of your implementation strategy later down the road. (More on this in future blogs.)

In my next blog, I will talk about how to get your arms around options for the new-and-improved support path you want to implement and how you use these Current State maps as part of that process.

Welcome!

• This category is intended for the exchange of best practices, tip, hints, and real-life strategies for increasing the potential for success in your SAP/ERP implementation: Organizational change, communication, training, support, documentation, Super Users, Centers of Excellence, teamwork, governance, and leadership.

Regardless of the system you’re implementing, all the research and lessons learned from those who have been there before you indicate that to maximize your opportunities for success you must pay attention to the “softer side” of systems implementations. That’s everything from how you manage your project team to maintaining a strong, engaged, and informed governance group; from the ongoing communication strategies you employ to inform and engage your stakeholders to integrated end user support and training programs.

This group is intended as a “Community of Practice” (or Center of Excellence) for anyone who has responsibility in SAP/ERP implementations—a place where professionals can network, exchange ideas, and seek answers to the project questions that all of us face at one time or another which focus on end user acceptance and adoption of new systems and processes.

Join your colleagues—both practitioners and consultants—as we explore these key areas for SAP/ERP success!

SAP End Users: Getting this discussion started!

Having presented several programs at SAP Insider conferences in the past 3 months around the subject of end user support, I continue to discover that one of the biggest challenges facing organizations in their SAP implementation is how to build support programs for ends users that are effective and efficient.

Therefore, I’m going to start this blog out with a focus on SUPPORT–which ultimately will expand into an ongoing discussion of Super User programs. I invite you to join in with your ideas, observations, war stories and success stories, questions, and arguments on this subject.

As well, feel free to add any other areas around end users and SAP to this discussion thread for which you want to have a dialogue with professionals and colleagues!