The Social Media Giveth, And The Social Media Taketh Away


If you ask me what has had the biggest impact in my life for the last few years, I will say without exception that it is social media. And I am only a minor league bench quality player in social media , compared to the stalwarts. But even then – it has changed how I live and work.  On the personal front – I won’t go to a restaurant or buy a book at an airport without checking out reviews, or asking on twitter for a quick opinion . Without facebook, I would never have kept up with what is happening in the world of competitive dog shows, which is my hobby.  On the work front – twitter is a life saver. I have lost count of how many times others have helped me find information quickly, or offered help when I tweet out a question.  It is also rather  funny that I usually never get a timely response from most of these sources if I tried on email or phone.  I blog when I get an idea that I think more than one person would like to hear – and nothing has taught me more in these past years than clarifying thoughts in my own head when I settle down in a plane ride, and open my computer to post something on my blog.

But for all that it gives, social media also has a terrific/terrible way of taking away.  When President Obama was candidate Obama in the last elections, I had seen many of my friends on Facebook supporting the campaign there, and helping with fund raising.  I was pretty impressed that his campaign was smart enough to use social media to raise so much money and awareness. And this year – I see many other friends effectively use Facebook to attack Obama’s policies, and help his rivals to raise money.

I have lived in US for about a dozen years now – and have watched with amusement how polarized people are when it comes to political ideology. Some of the smartest people I know – people who provide very balanced and well thought out opinions on work related matters, and who are polite at kid’s soccer games – they tend to make extremely biased statements with no restraint when it comes to politics. This is true for people in both left and right wings of the political spectrum. And in these 12 years, I have only seen the partisan nature increase – not decrease, both by career politicians, and by common man . Watching Facebook and twitter, I have a feeling this partisan nature has accelerated since the last election. Social media gives information so quickly, and without any editorial intervention – that it permeates faster than any other information delivery mechanism of our times.

While I was growing up in India, most people there had no idea of US election politics. We knew who the American President was, and that there were 2 parties, and that was pretty much it. Now my cousins,  nieces and nephews in India know as much about US politics as people who live here. It was quite amusing for me to hear how they view American politics strictly based on what they see on social media.

This is not just an isolated thing that affects politicians alone. I see this all the time with enterprise software world too – affecting vendors, influencers, customers etc. Some software vendors have totally embraced social media. I have seen many email signatures that read “social media leader for blah blah” as the designation of the sender. People actually get paid to manage social media, and I don’t even find it funny any more. Admittedly, I was shocked and found it funny when I first saw it – but not any more. I have accepted it for a fact that vendors want to control social media some how.

Question is – is social media giving them sufficient bang for the buck? Every one I have asked so far from vendor side assures me it is hugely beneficial to them. It is not a secret that vendors like to “buy” influence some how. Some do it with finesse – and give influencers enough information, and then get out-of-the-way on how it gets interpreted and analyzed. Some are more blunt, and will use social media as a pure marketing platform and blast out tweets, and blogs that praise themselves and say nasty things about competitors.  Some times different parts of the same company take diverse approaches when it comes to use of social media, which probably just results in erosion of  brand credibility .

But how many buyers make a decision based on social media? very few that I have seen. There are a few exceptions, but largely the purchasing process in enterprises have not followed the shift that has happened in consumer side.  But there is a silver lining too – although ultimate buyers don’t value social media all that much, there are influencers to that buying decision who make up their minds based on what they have seen in social media. I have been surprised personally when I give out my business card, and someone I have not met before would say ” Ah I recognize you from twitter and your blog”. It has occasionally also helped me win business. So may be it is just a matter of time before social media becomes a big criteria for enterprise purchases . But at least for now and for near future, more weight is still given to quality of the product, price, references etc.

I am yet to see a CXO who told me ” I am impressed that you guys refuted your competitors’ mean comments in your sponsored blog. I am now convinced I should buy from you, let me cut a check for perpetual licenses. Looking forward to more content like this”.  But what I have seen is CIOs and others calling me and asking ” hey, my team just pointed this flurry of activity to me from this company. Why do you think these guys are suddenly saying all this stuff about the other guys? What are they really afraid of ?  Should I be worried?”.  In my mind – it is a  perfect example of social media back firing , despite good intentions.

Social media is a fantastic opportunity to listen to your ecosystem, as long as you also follow-up with some action.  Then you can use social media to point out the actions that you took.  Of course, you can also use it mostly as a platform to shout from – but then you carry the risk of your ecosystem tuning you out quickly.  Even before social media existed, it was not possible to get a second chance create a great first impression. With social media, it is next to impossible. People form opinions really quickly based on what you do in social media. If you mess up – it will be hard to earn back the trust.  It is a hard balance to strike, but now that the pundits have social media maturity models and best practices, I suppose this is all well covered.

Analyzing Project Success – talent wins games, teamwork wins championships !


I am on cloud nine at the moment – our team successfully finished a huge big project go live in a “minimum fuss” way (THE way go-live should be) and I am getting ready to party hard with the gang.

It was a journey that started in the fall of 2009 – and the team is as intense today as they were 2 years ago. But the one thing that gives me more satisfaction than anything else is that there was no “us and them” between client team and “my” team apart from a contractual/legal perspective. I hold this as the prime reason for our success – we could have done every thing else right, but without this “joined at the hip” partnership – we would not be here today celebrating, and smiling ear to ear. Due to confidentiality reasons – I cannot disclose the client or the exact work we did, but I thought some one would benefit from my experience if I shared a few highlights from the project. If I manage to get the legal hurdles cleared, I will make a second post to complete the picture.

The client brought in an A team from their side – and the project was owned by a senior executive from business. Both business and IT leadership reported to her. Consequently, everything was done with the sole objective of making sure business got what they needed. The Program manager, technical manager, development manager, architects and project managers were all great people with great domain expertise – and they all wanted to “get the job done”. Even when they disagreed (passionately), they had the maturity and trust in each other to discuss and get to common ground.

Right from the start, we partnered at all levels of the program organization – from developers to sponsors. We had several hiccups along the way ( attrition issues, technical issues, relationship issues etc) – but since we had strong relationships, there was no difficulty in having honest conversations on what is happening , and how we are going to solve it. In a large complex program spread over multiple locations – this is critical. Nothing was ever hidden in status reports – full transparency, and joint plans to solve problems, and joint parties to celebrate successes .

A fantastic example of the partnership that I remember on top of my head was when we were finalizing scope early on. I, and another person brought up a discussion that the number of reports to be developed looked out of whack based on past experience. The leadership team took it seriously, and went back to discuss more on this – and came back with a scope that was about a third of what was originally proposed. They identified redundancies, and lower priorities and diligently worked through to save the project a lot of unnecessary work. I had made this recommendation on reducing scope, despite it meaning my team will bill significantly lower hours and there by make less $$ . The point is – $$ billed is not the biggest success factor for a consulting company. The primary goal for the consulting company is extremely high customer satisfaction leading to long term partnership, and being elevated to ” Trusted Adviser” status with the client. My mentors taught me that lesson early in my career, and I try to teach that to the next generation of PMs that come after me.

Change requests have a big bad name in project management field, especially with analyst community – and the word on the street is that SIs use it to milk a client dry. I never had any trouble in this regard – all changes were discussed in detail and agreed on, before we proceeded with any change requests. Every change had full justification and agreement, and I am very proud of the fact that not once in the whole life of the project did any one have to say “lets see what the written contract says”. That is the beauty of having a solid relationship across all parties involved, and a solid process to govern the project change control.

As I look back in time, the one thing that strikes me most is the sheer number of people who learned valuable skills and experience in the project from both client and our side. Leadership is all about empowering the team , and delegating authority and not just responsibility. While the project had a well defined escalation path, a lot of decisions were successfully taken by people closest to the issue, with appropriate heads up given to management for integration purposes. Having gone through this experience, I am sure we are all well positioned for success at whatever comes next in our careers. It gives me a lot of satisfaction that a lot of leadership talent was identified and nurtured through the program.

One thing I learned in the course of the last 2 years is that there is no one-size-fits-all way to motivate a big team. Some get motivated by money, some by getting additional responsibility and visibility, yet others by periodic change of roles within the project and so on. My project leaders and architects are exceptional – they found what made every team member tick, and acted on it, taking my help where needed. I still remember being fascinated by developers in my team pretty much competing for fun on who will find the most bugs, who will fix the most bugs and so on – over weekends and holidays, on their own time. How awesome is that? I could not be more proud of my gang – they rock. We have our fair share of disagreements – but team work and a common goal of making the project successful, ensures we get over them in the shortest time, and healthiest manner possible.

Last but not least – there is a lot I am thankful to my support staff, ,my managers and my mentors. A two plus year project of this size meant that I had to ask for help periodically. They not only gave me support and guidance behind the scenes – they also came in person and celebrated our successes. They cared – and we appreciated that a lot, and it is a lesson we will take with us as we progress in our own careers.

Most people who read this would have made an assumption that this was an SAP project – with me being an out-and-out SAP guy, and an SAP mentor and all that. Well, this was NOT an SAP project. It was my first non-SAP project too. I am an extremely hands on person when it comes to technology – but I had to learn to trust the technology experts on this gig. It was very unpleasant for me at the beginning, since I am used to providing a lot of technical input to my team in SAP projects . But I learned that there are many people with MUCH better technical talent than me – and I should just trust their judgment. That was a HUGE lesson for me, and one of the most important ones I learned. Of course I did not learn it fully (yet) and occasionally jump in and make comments based on what I think are corresponding scenarios in SAP 🙂 . I must also say that this has made an impact on my view of SAP. There is a lot SAP practitioners can learn from the non-SAP world, and I am glad I now have this experience under my belt.

Success is multi-dimensional. A lot of times projects get measured along time lines and budgets alone. We surely managed by SPI, CPI etc – but that was just one of the many dimensions. We were clear on conditions of satisfaction, and both my client counterpart and I were committed all the way to make sure we kept each other in the loop on what is happening. It is a professional relationship I cherish, and I am sure it will continue past this project too.

As Michael Jordan said ” Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships” . I second that – 3 cheers to the team ! There is more work to be done for remaining phases of the program – but for now,let us Party 🙂

SAP HANA – slowly moving out of hype into actual projects


2011 was when HANA hype was on over drive – it was along the lines of “HANA will solve world hunger by feeding entire generations on perceived future business value” . Every where I mentioned HANA, customers were pushing back with raised eyebrows. That did not stop SAP from selling HANA though. SAP customers do not typically buy licenses piecemeal – they buy a basket of stuff, and apparently HANA was in a lot of baskets, especially in the last quarter. This is not unusual buying behavior – it is the norm.

And then 2011 ran out. When I came back from vacation, I was amazed with the demand for big ERP projects. And right on its heels, came demand for HANA projects. Not isolated demands – many customers, some of them VERY big names – are now sufficiently intrigued to start pilots for HANA. To say the least, it has taken me by surprise – the pleasant kind.

There is a huge amount of misinformation on HANA that has been spread knowingly or unknowingly in 2011. I think the first half of 2012 will be spent setting expectations straight.

A very common scenario I am running into these days is customers that have custom built data warehouses in Oracle or SQL Server. These have thousands of Stored procedures etc. They want to find out how to migrate this over to HANA. Or more specifically – they want to know if there is a way to semi-automate the conversion of SQL of existing solutions to HANA’s SQL. If they cannot do that – the cost of re-inventing the solution in HANA from scratch is not something they seem to have an appetite for. I have pinged SAP to ask what they think about this. If you know the answer – please post a comment.

Another common question – “so we buy HANA as a datamart, then put HANA under BW as DB, and then under ECC – will this all sit in one appliance? do we need to buy more and more licenses and hardware?”. So far I have not had to explicitly answer this question. Funny enough – they look at the expression on my face and deduce the right answer magically 🙂

Basis experts invariably ask me “hey can we virtualize HANA? Can you put it on a cloud and offer us as a service? When will SAP support non-intel processors and other OS? ” . My answer usually is to point them to existing documentation. If they persist, I show them the installation files and how it can be hacked. That is the best way to deal with techies , right?

Landscape Sizing, HA and DR are all high on CIO agenda – they just want assurances that they can safely deploy this in production. This is a lot more easier now to answer than even a few months ago, since there are more options available, and we have more experience with sizing. This is also where people start getting an idea of the real cost in putting up a HANA system – and there is always an aha moment.

The other half of the aha moment comes from clients understanding there is no one HANA consultant who makes the system stand up and work. SAP started off by saying “HANA is an appliance” – and that is partly to blame for this. An appliance is like a fridge or a wireless router – you buy from a store, bring it home and it starts working after it is powered on with very few instructions. HANA is not a true appliance in that sense- and once customers get that, they realize it is like every other project. HANA needs multiple skills to pull off successfully – data modelling, BOBJ, Admin/security, ETL etc.

BW on HANA has captured the attention of several customers. SAP is doing a good job pushing it in the field. I met several field sales people at FKOM, and was amazed to see how pumped up they are to sell HANA. But more than BW itself – a lot of customers are waiting for BPC to work on HANA. I was not very pleased with the BOBJ integration with HANA initially, but it has improved and I know more improvements are planned. It is best for SAP to nail it before customers start several projects in parallel and stress out SAP support.

Many of my customers – and me too – are waiting eagerly to see how many companies will SAP parade at SAPPHIRE as live on HANA , especially for the BW case. If SAP shows a large number of customers on the key note stage, then we should have a great HANA year in 2012. Towards middle of the year, I think many more HANA projects will start – and not just small pilots. And If SAP does come out with ECC on HANA by end of the year, it will be an excellent shot in the arm. 2012 could well ramp into a terrific 2013 for HANA.