It is very easy not to forget the New year’s resolution. How? As Kevin Cassidy from SAP has demonstrated in the last 48 hours on Facebook a public survey can be a good starting point.
New Year's resolution: Quit smoking and debugging have already discussed whether quit smoking and stop debugging could be good New Year’s resolution.
I tried to complement these discussions by writting down some proposals for New Year’s resolutions for SAP consultants. They are based on my experiences during reviews and lessons learnt sessions which I supported during the year. If these proposals can influence your New Year’s I would be very satisfied. Do not get me wrong: Many of the SAP consultants I know are doing an excellent job. But sometimes the start of a new year is a very good point to question own habits.
Therefore here are my proposals:
- Listen: I will listen actively and limit my speech time in discussions with customers especially in requirement gathering sessions. Moreover I will not enter a room with a fixed solution in my mind.
- Limit your working hour’s onsite: I will limit my working hours outside emergency situations to 8 hours as I will not be productive after that any more. I will clearly communicate this ratio to my customers.
- Say no: I will reject activities which I do not see as a good option for the customers even though that can mean that I lose some work in the first instance.
- Regular brain work out on SCN: I will finish my working hours three times a week with a brain work out on SCN which means reading content on SCN not directly related to my project activities.
- Offer new perspectives: I will offer my customers new perspectives in the new areas of Mobility, In-memory-computing and the cloud even when it is outside my project activities.
- Document: I will not finish any activity before I have documented it so that my customers can work with it without my support.
Perhaps you think that these are unrealistic New Year’s resolutions and that you cannot afford them. I do not think so. My deep conviction is that these are practices which are mandatory for a successful SAP consultant in 2012 and beyond. The 1st of January is a good day to begin.
