Tag Archives: influence

I have some feedback for you…

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Right, this feels kinda awkward… I’m about to give Microsoft kudos and point out how I wish that some SAP processes were closer to what I’ve seen from the team from Microsoft. So bear with me if I seem a little less hyperboly than regularly…

This isn’t the Microsoft you remember

Recently I was working through the options for integrating SAP SuccessFactors personnel records into Microsoft AD, it’s something that every organisation that doesn’t have a dedicated IAM or (IdAM, however you want to make up your TLAs or FLAs) is likely to need in their environment. Have to say, I love working with new “start-up” orgs that don’t use an on-prem AD, but there’s not quite so many of those that are large enough to pick up SuccessFactors that they are probably still a minority.

Documentation is a skill that is distinct from development

Anyway, I happened to look at the Azure AD online doco about SuccessFactors integration and discovered it had been written by a developer. Well, that’s a guess, but seriously, who digs through the results of an API call to get config values out of a system when you can just use the standard tooling to do it? And then makes some poor sod document how to use Postman to do the same? So I suggested an update.

Arrrgggh!

no – just use the UI!

So, I was feeling benevolent and thought I’d offer my advice that perhaps there was a better way. I clicked the feedback button…

Shock horror – I wasn’t redirected to another site and asked to create a new user, I was asked to create a Github issue! (Okay if you don’t have a Github user, you’ll be asked to create one, but seriously, you don’t have a Github user id?)

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/62443

Totes easy!

And now we wait… or not

Then I resigned myself to never hearing back about it again… But I did!

Issue was triaged and assigned to the document author to review that very same day! (that’s not normal is it?)

I was – wow!

Then things got surreal…

Not only did I have someone look at and action the feedback that I gave, they then went and found my tweet on the subject and personally responded to it! Wat?

And now, the update to the documentation is about to go live:

And hopefully that will make some poor consultant/tech support person’s life a little bit easier.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

So let’s compare and contrast. And I know this isn’t apples – doco is different to application UI changes, but, lets compare the process at least.

I was working on the new SAP SuccessFactors IAS/IPS integration on my own company’s system when had an issue – I couldn’t figure out how to change some value in the config. Fortunately there is a partner community that SAP have set up for partners to discuss these sorts things and get some assistance from each other.

(Sidebar – Yes, I know it’s a bizarre idea, consultants helping our competing firms consultants do stuff. But in the scheme of things, the other consultants are all good people, they just aren’t lucky enough to work for my company, and helping others tends to do pretty good things for your own internal skills too.)

If you don’t know, then ask!

So I raised the issue in the forum and the really nice SAP person how has to read all my grumbles and moderate the forum raised it in the fortnightly call that SAP hosts for partners (it’s at 12:30am my local time, which makes it a bit fun, but better that than 6am!)

And there was already a solution! WOOO HOOO!

Pretty cool, so I had a look..

https://help.sap.com/viewer/6d6d63354d1242d185ab4830fc04feb1/Cloud/en-US/be6d6f210d30404d827f8c9e78ec4489.html

If you have to attend training to do something, it isn’t intuitive.

Let’s just say I wasn’t impressed with the UX and I realised why I hadn’t figured out how to do this myself! Because colouring something BLUE in an SAP UI5 app is possibly the least intuitive thing on planet to do to indicate that it is editable if you click it. Possibly the developers had played one too many games of Day of the Tentacle and thought users needing to randomly waving their mouse around the screen to see if it changes pointer shape is a good way to indicate to people that something is clickable? (Okay I doubt that was actually the case, more likely someone threw a guideline at them that didn’t make sense and they had to get inventive to work around it (been there!)). Pretty much everything in standard SAP UI5 apps are cyan or blue, and I’m not checking everyone one of them to see if it’s different.

So I gave some feedback on the forum.

I even tweeted about it. Cause that’s what you do, right? (Well it’s what I do. I mean there’s a certain type of person who stays up late at night writing blog posts about these sort of things, so what do you expect?)

This then lead to a bit of a conversation in my DM’s with someone from SAP (since it was DM’s I’ll not share, private stays private) who suggested that I really needed to raise this with support since it was an issue, and that helps track that people have issues. Likewise in the forums I was directed to raise it formally.

To whom it may concern

So I raised a SAP Support ticket (low priority since I already had a fully working work-around.)

I would happily have bet on the response, and I’d have won!

Thanks Mike – yep, the ole “Raise an enhancement request” gambit. That place where good ideas go to die.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead”

But by this time I was, “right whatever, lets see how far this sucker goes!” So I raised that enhancement request.

Oh – and whilst I was doing that, I came across a small issue…

The feedback site is hosted in Europe. I am not in Europe. But that’s cool because there’s this concept called CDNs, yeah, that allow large websites that are accessed around the world to be accessed in a reasonably fast manner from everywhere.

Yup – CDN wasn’t enabled. It is now – so the rest of you can thank me for suffering on your behalf!

Sod it though I’m gonna get this bugger filed! Oooh flashy light on my phone…

Anyway after much self flagellation

I got the request raised! had to attach my diagram as an “attachment” not able to be viewed inline in the request – but hey – it was raised.

And there it sat…

Tick tock…

Three weeks later my request was “Acknowledged”.

What’s the German word for “million to one chances happen constantly”?

And in the weird way that the universe works, whilst I have been typing this up, I got a comment on the request, strangely I didn’t get a notification (yet) but keeping my fingers crossed that sometime tonight. I did just check my spam email folder too, and interesting that it’s about 30/70 banking phishing scams and webinar invites, sure it used to be far more interesting. But nothing to notify me that my request had an update.

The really nice lead designer for the product reached out and asked me what I thought about their thoughts about making some UI changes to make things easier to use!

The response was awesome! I Loved it!

they ended the message with a request for my thoughts!

“Please let us know what you think.”

YES, YES, YES!

Well – I can say I was totally stoked, so happy! And then I tried to find the button to reply….

The irony of wanting to reply to a conversation about improving UI to make things more obvious and easier for people to use and then not being able to because the UI of the tool in which the conversation is happening doesn’t facilitate it.

Anyway. I did what I always do. Tweet lots, then try to figure out what to do…

It would appear that someone thought that it would make more sense for new comments to appear at the top of the conversation, not the bottom. So by clicking on the comments “tab” at the top of the page I was navigated up the screen and saw that I could enter a new comment. I did. And I tried to be very nice in my feedback (given the amount of huffing and puffing I’d been doing seconds before.)

Two ways of doing things, both with good result

So, we have two different scenarios, both ended up (or will hopefully end up with) some change in the product as influenced and suggested by me. Two out of two is pretty good going. However, one took 3 weeks, the other, over 3 months. One was painless and easy, the other painful and frustrating. As I said earlier, we’re not comparing apples to apples – getting a product changed is much harder than getting some doco changed. And I have heard anecdotally that some areas of SAP are even faster:

Interesting to note that the area that got the same day response that Robin mentions is also using the Microsoft Github tooling to manage issues. I wonder if tooling impacts delivery approach?

Yes – AND?

So what do I want to achieve by writing all this (other than hopefully amusing a few of you with the tale)? Well, I think it’s important that it’s documented how difficult giving good and constructive feedback can be. Only by taking a look at what’s happening can we get on the right path to working together to make everything we do better and easier.

I’ll finish by just mentioning that EVERYONE that I have dealt with when providing feedback at both SAP and Microsoft have been AWESOME. Both organisations do understand and value feedback. It’s not a people problem.

SuccessConnect 2019

Just some very brief highlights and musings from the lounge in LAX whilst I wait for my flight home to Melbourne.

This was the eXperience SuccessConnect, there were X’s everywhere! The amount of airtime that Qualtrics and experience management got may well have equalled the amount of time that the SuccessFactors product was discussed.

My SuccessConnect really kicked off with  the Monday partner briefing and meeting up with Sylvie Otten and introduced to Micheal Grimm from Ingentis. Was good to start off the event with a good moan about the state of CF vs Neo when it came to SuccessFactors extensions. Sorry Sylvie – I earned my namesake.

At least she was smiling in the photo!

 

Next up was the partner briefing – after having made the mistake of sitting near the front last year at it being the most boring multiple hours of the conference, I sat at the back so I could sneak out rather than pass out with boredom.

I was wrong.

David Ludlow completely creamed it with his update on roadmap and recent changes. That was probably the best 20mins of the entire conference. Wish I had sat nearer the front! Although have discovered that taking photos of slides in SAP’s newly preferred dark theme really doesn’t come out well, the black comes out browny grey – doesn’t look so cool… 🙁 But I got the slide deck – gold!

There were many cool things in there, but the new UI being proposed for the user landing page was probably the most exciting bit – which is why David didn’t say much about it, but left that for Amy the next day at the keynote.

Lots of debate about this new conversational AI based UI. With the biggest one being, there better still be menus and some way i can add a link to view my payslips, and apply for leave  with one click without having to type in “view my payslip”.

We’ll see how it develops as looks like planned delivery 2020 – but I’ll bet on it not being GA before next SuccessConnect. Perhaps beta with a couple of customers… lets see next year.

After David’s excellent presentation I got to catch up with the team of analysts and media folk who’d had a briefing that day. Josh Greenbaum was holding court and had some interesting comments around SAP’s strategy with payroll, but the wine and food was excellent and I left with some of the folks there to go to the exhibition show floor and do what I was supposed to be at the conference for (not chin wagging with analysts!)

I was here at SuccessConnect to sell a SAP CP extension for SuccessFactors that me and my team have built – it provides EHS functionality embedded into SuccessFactors. It’s pretty cool! But I would say that!

 

I have discovered that I sell much better with a glass of wine in my hand…

After that it was to Jewel nightclub to the Kronos and Rizing party (not sure I really should have continued drinking, next day was hard work!) But did get to meet up with Sherryanne Meyer which was nice.

 

The next day was lots of water and the keynote.

Image

Have to say, I love the moments that matter idea. as in consider where you are putting your effort in making certain processes work better. It’s probably much more important that the initial day one experience for an employee is better than the process they have to use to apply for leave. They might apply for leave hundreds of times, but they only have one day one and it will be a much bigger impact. Think about the return to work process for return from parental leave, make that a great experience don’t worry so much about timesheet entry….

However I heard the term FAR too over used during the conference and used outside of the context i just described.

And then the keynote just went to “eXperience”. It was wow, everything was about HXM or Human eXperience Management, not Human Capital Management. Look, I dislike the HCM idea of treating employees as “Capital”, that’s not what we try to do, but still there is a whole bunch more the the successful running of employees in a business than just looking after their experience!

I observed cynically to someone (the night club from night before possibly didn’t help my mood) that it seemed  that the SuccessFactors exec team had all been given bigger KPIs to sell Qualtrics than they had to sell SuccessFactors.

 

After the keynote were lots of general sessions including loads of roadmap sessions! The conference team really listened to the customer desire for roadmap sessions and most were repeated at least one. Even better the sessions were short on presentation and long on questions. This is why people come to conferences rather than reading the slides at home (and without having to fly stupid distances around the world). So SUPER KUDOS to the SuccessFactors team, your roadmap sessions were AWESOME! I had lots of fun in one run by Mark McCawley who I meet for the first time and leaked some news that I’m hoping we can reveal soon that will make many customers very happy!

Saw mention that instance sync tool will allow copy back of employee data from prod to non-prod systems (without full system refresh) allowing for trouble shooting of issues in test environments – this is awesome and will be a huge benefit for customers. When you look at the list price that Accenture were/are charging for a SAP CP tool that does similar thing, you can see how customers were really wanting this functionality!

Talking of the SAP App Store and SAP CP extensions, they were highly visible this year on the show floor and customers were clearly interested!

Final keynote was more eXperience Qualtrics puff along with 3 partner add on solutions, and a strange plug for SAP.io which I’m pretty sure the audience didn’t care about. Much disappointment that non of the partners on the stage with SuccessFactors add ons were using SAP Cloud Platform – a real lost opportunity to showcase the power and benefit of having extensions that look like they are just additional modules of SuccessFactors, a functionality that SuccessFactors has that is unique – I’m afraid integration to ServiceNow isn’t really that unique…

Last day and the team:

went to the golf driving range, where I discovered I’m not terrible at this golf lark, but not good at it either. Was fun!

Anyway – flight about to be called.

Was great to be at SuccessConnect, think it would be good for the SuccessFactors exec team to perhaps take a moment to listen to the SAP Mentor feedback – perhaps we can arrange something for next year?

If all I hear are benefits, either you aren’t thinking or you are in sales

I just read

http://scn.sap.com/community/cloud/blog/2014/08/04/moving-to-the-cloud–what-the-hell-is-cloud-computing by @Kunal_Pandya

It’s a good piece about the benefits of cloud. And it does a great job of explaining some terminology. However, I came across one bit that I just couldn’t let go.

“What % of your customers are on the latest version of your software?”. 

If the answer is less than 100%, it is not multi-tenant.

Four times a year SuccessFactors would answer less than 100%. Why? Because some companies have paid to be upgraded slightly later than others so as to ensure that if they are any issues, they are less likely to see them.

Also within SuccessFactors customers, many would not be using the latest tools. Why? Because they have opted not to run those areas, as change management is costly and they don’t see the need, yet. Are they running the latest version – arguably yes and no, they have access to it, but certainly they are multi-tenant within the data centre.

Within the HANA Cloud Platform, one has the option to run an application/database without downtime for 6 months – it will continue to run on the version of the software that was released at the time the application was started. However, the platform is updated every 2 weeks. Bounce your application and it will pick up the newest runtime. Clearly not every customer is using the latest version of the solution. Is the solution multi-tenant? This is perhaps a harder one to answer as even within the same data centre there are different versions. However, all these versions are running within containers that are provided by the same software. So perhaps it is multi-tenant? I’d suggest that it is, but it fails the 100% on one version test.

My points here are 1) it is dangerous to make sweeping generalisations and 2) that whilst there are large benefits to moving to multi-tenant solutions, there is also a real business demand expressed in $$$ to ensure stability of solution, which is a real risk of a “true” multi-tenant solution.

The diagrams of Sven in SaaS and PaaS: a symbiotic relationship delivering enterprise value do well to show the immense value of cloud solutions over traditional onPremise model but don’t hide the downsides either.

I think it’s worth while to show two sides of an argument. When trying to convince someone to buy an apple rather than an orange, point out that the orange is juicier, but perhaps the apple has less risk of spilling juice down your shirt front when biting in to it.

I think it is imperative that if we are to be trusted as advisers to those that claim that they don’t understand #cloud (and probably those that do too) we should probably discuss the downsides too.

Perhaps that’s bad practise in sales, to point out the bad sides of your product? Perhaps why sales people are consistently rated untrustworthy? Me I’d rather not have someone accuse me of being in sales. 😉

Reader’s Digest Poll – Trusted People 2014

Gallop Poll – Honesty/Ethics in Professions

 

Twitter tightrope

Influence this you <removed>

Walking on a tightrope with the birds

Recently I passed the completely arbitrary mark of 1000 twitter followers. Yeah! Woohoo! Well done me! (Please note points with exclamation mark are meant to be dripping with sarcasm.)

And around the same time, I unfollowed – shock horror – two folks I had been following for quite some time. Now, I know I’m not the social media guru who can use twitter perfectly with lots of lists, following back people and then analysing where the links in my post have been successful and all that bs. But, I stopped to think about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and whether the same could/should be done to me by the wonderful bunch of idiots people that follow my twitter handle.

Unfollow 1 – Where is my personal space?

The first person I unfollowed, is great at sharing interesting content, and has some really useful things to say about some stuff that I’m interested in. However, they also have a LOT to say about politics. It might even be a political view that I agree with and sometimes I’ve had fun following some of those links. However, sometimes it went beyond fun and started getting nasty. Now, I strongly support people’s right to have a political viewpoint (I have one) however, if I’m going to include you in my feed of people that I want to listen to, please don’t make me uncomfortable by going all extreme on me, regularly.

Unfollow 2 – Wake me up to smell the coffee!

The second person I unfollowed was the polar opposite. They tweeted some interesting stuff occasionally. But generally their sharing of info was following the company line so intently that I never had the view that the stuff they were sharing was more than their company’s carefully edited press releases. I decided that in balance, press releases disguised as personal viewpoints was just a bit too boring, and I didn’t really want them in my timeline.

Walking a tightrope

Clearly, being too extreme is bad, but being too timid, is just as bad. So where one earth does one go? And this is the tightrope I guess that we walk. I’m certainly not pretending to know the answer and if one analyses the question it’s clear I’ve made some perhaps unsupportable assumptions. Is it really that bad if your audience is tightly aligned your viewpoints? If you’re gaining kudos in the eyes of your employer, is that a bad thing?

From my POV

I think in the end, the tightrope you walk is the one of your own making. It’s the choices that you make to go in the direction you want to go and associate with the people that you want to associate with. So for me, that means being slightly (but hopefully not offensively) irreverent, and keeping a T-shaped focus on the stuff I share. What it also means to me is that some things that I do care quite deeply about, for example climate change and the way that our generation is screwing the planet for my kids, I’m probably a LOT quieter about that I sometimes wish I was. Self censoring is a pain in the butt, however, it might just get me along the tightrope I want to walk. Just grab me after a few beers, and then I’ll tell you what I really think. 🙂