In my final reading/proofing of The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live (www.michaeldoane.com), I noted that I seldom went more than ten pages without ranting about how clients short-sheet their end users at every turn, well before coming to an entire chapter on the subject (The Care and Nurturing of SAP End Users). I considered toning it down but ending up leaving it all in. In brief, my complaint is that clients want to do anything but train their users (buying more software is usually the preference) whereas their ROI is going right out the back door because of general user incompetence.
In the course of writing The SAP Green Book, I talked with a number of consultants, analysts, and clients, including a CIO whom I greatly admire and whose firm has thrived for ten years with SAP applications. Here is a near-verbatim snippet of one of our conversations.
Me: So how are things going, Bruce? Still thriving after go-live?
Bruce: Clear sailing.
Me: How about your end user competency? Everyone up to speed?
Bruce: Oh, for sure.
Me: What if I interviewed one or two of them?
Bruce: Uh, hold it. You got me there. I don’t really have any idea.
Bruce’s company went live in 1999. In the intervening ten years, there has been no formal user refresher training.
From The SAP Green Book
In 1990, a good friend of mine helped an Australian company go live with SAP R/2. Eight years later, he was called back to the client for new work on SAP R/3. In the course of his project, he spent time with many of the people he had worked with before and in the course of a pub conversation he learned that despite a move from R/2 to R/3 and two subsequent upgrades, the users had received zero refresher training throughout the eight years. The effect, they said, was that through time they felt more and more intimidated (‘hemmed in”) by the applications software and were using less functionality than in previous years. This intimidation only increased with each new change in functionality.
This situation is wide-spread. Therefore it is encouraging to read about success at Xerox, where end user training was the key to a successful roll-out:
The key difference with this roll-out...is that Xerox accepted user training as a prerequisite for going live and made sure that end-users had enough time to complete their courses. "This meant 80% of end-users had to complete the basic training programme before going live," says Farrow.
Xerox used 1,400 training simulations taken from the company's final SAP implementation, rather than interim versions of the software. This meant there were no surprises and relatively few problems when it went live. "Well-trained people will always be able to do their job more efficiently," she says.
In the past, Xerox has squeezed training budgets and timelines in favour of system development and design. This is because unlike the technical aspects of system roll-outs, the benefits of training are difficult to quantify, says Farrow. "Training always got the short end of the stick and we had to fight to get it on the critical path of the project."
Full article = http://bit.ly/81oWKo
In the course of writing The SAP Green Book, I talked with a number of consultants, analysts, and clients, including a CIO whom I greatly admire and whose firm has thrived for ten years with SAP applications. Here is a near-verbatim snippet of one of our conversations.
Me: So how are things going, Bruce? Still thriving after go-live?
Bruce: Clear sailing.
Me: How about your end user competency? Everyone up to speed?
Bruce: Oh, for sure.
Me: What if I interviewed one or two of them?
Bruce: Uh, hold it. You got me there. I don’t really have any idea.
Bruce’s company went live in 1999. In the intervening ten years, there has been no formal user refresher training.
From The SAP Green Book
In 1990, a good friend of mine helped an Australian company go live with SAP R/2. Eight years later, he was called back to the client for new work on SAP R/3. In the course of his project, he spent time with many of the people he had worked with before and in the course of a pub conversation he learned that despite a move from R/2 to R/3 and two subsequent upgrades, the users had received zero refresher training throughout the eight years. The effect, they said, was that through time they felt more and more intimidated (‘hemmed in”) by the applications software and were using less functionality than in previous years. This intimidation only increased with each new change in functionality.
This situation is wide-spread. Therefore it is encouraging to read about success at Xerox, where end user training was the key to a successful roll-out:
The key difference with this roll-out...is that Xerox accepted user training as a prerequisite for going live and made sure that end-users had enough time to complete their courses. "This meant 80% of end-users had to complete the basic training programme before going live," says Farrow.
Xerox used 1,400 training simulations taken from the company's final SAP implementation, rather than interim versions of the software. This meant there were no surprises and relatively few problems when it went live. "Well-trained people will always be able to do their job more efficiently," she says.
In the past, Xerox has squeezed training budgets and timelines in favour of system development and design. This is because unlike the technical aspects of system roll-outs, the benefits of training are difficult to quantify, says Farrow. "Training always got the short end of the stick and we had to fight to get it on the critical path of the project."
Full article = http://bit.ly/81oWKo