When I had the idea of CharITy SAP Projects I thought that this would be easy to get them started. In the next months I learned that (at least in Germany) this is a difficult task:
- Many people didn’t understand this concept. I think this has something to do that they can’t imagine that someone offers a training or spot consulting "for free".
- Some people in HCM context you thought I would be looking for a new job and sent to me standardized letters that there are no free positions in their company.
- Other HCM people liked the concept but they had difficulties with their budgets: There processes require that they offer standardized trainings scheduled at least one year ago.
I discussed this with a senior coach whose clients are executives of companies and he suggested that there should be a charitable trust that drives these projects. I agree with this idea but I don’t have so much time to arrange a new organization. Maybe SAP could help us here? But this is a topic for another blog post.
But then I was lucky: a freelancer contacted to coach him in a technical topic I am specialized in. I suggested to do it as SAP CharITy project so he should donate the money to a nonprofit organization of my choice who does really good work. He agreed and so we started.
I think this freelancer made a really good decision:
- He decided that standardized trainings have been some disadvantages: it’s difficult to participate because as freelancer he hasn’t so much free time so it has to be an online training in the evening.
- He needs a training especially tailored for him according to his knowledge and the things he wants to learn.
- He wants learn about solutions for real-world problems and wants to discuss them with experts who already implemented many of those solutions.
The preparation for this advanced training took me some time but it was a challenge:
- At first I chose to preparate a script we would use in every online webinar as guideline. Of course in an online session we are free to digress or get into details but I wanted to suggest some learning goals, exercises and solution that I wrote down and sent him before the webinar. This training material was tailored for him and I hope it will help him in the next projects.
- I decided to start with the basics and thought about the most common things that are unknown to most developers and to present a solution as well as many beginner’s mistakes.
- He already asked me to find solutions for real-world problems so I was glad he sent me code snippets as well as solutions he created before. This was extremely helpful because I studied them, found some exemplary solutions and wrote down how I found them in the script. Then I added additional information about the concepts and techniques I used. Of course I won’t use these examples neither in future trainings nor in blogs – they are strictly confident.
In fact it took my some hours for preparation but I was extremely motivated because I want this project to be a success.
In this blog entry I blogged about my first SAP CharITy project and that customized trainings are a good candidate for this approach. I already sketched the concept of my training. In the next blog I’ll blog about the experience with this training and what I learned.