COVID-19: Potential opportunities for you & your company

[marcowahler]

Dear all,

recently I read the newsletter from SAP about the current situation with the corona virus
( https://news.sap.com/2020/03/statement-customers-covid-19-concerns/ ) and was asking myself how to support. I decided to write this blog, with some ideas to support you. This is my personal view...

1. Get yourself ready for the time after COVID-19
There are tons of possibilities to educate yourself. In terms of SAP my organization has sensitized us SAP Consultants (approx. 400 people) to use free time for personal education. Our management team has approved this approach and we are setting up education plans for our Consultants. A core team is pre-selecting relevant SAP learning journeys (i.e. focused on S/4HANA, Cloud, Integration), which are finally & hopefully ending up in SAP Certifications, once they are available again ( http://training.sap.com/ ). This helps people to use their time very efficient and don't waste time in finding the right courses, that are available as e-learning.

Some of those courses are free of charge, like https://open.sap.com

SAP has initiated a similar initiative, too.
https://news.sap.com/2020/03/new-sap-digital-learning-initiative/

2. Use spare time for new topics
I am used to work on leading edge technology, but this is not typical in other organizations. Working on a brand-new topic and building a Prototype is a great way to learn something new. Blogs like https://blogs.sap.com can give you great ideas and support, too. Proof of Concepts are mainly used to show a customer that it is possible to do the way it should work in future, but nobody knows if it is really working, yet. I have a lot of such "customer worries" in back of mind, which I can work on now, even from home office. That helps me in the next customer meetings to convince and confirm what is possible or not.

3. Housekeeping
I like to work on SAP Demo Systems to test functionality that I need in a specific case or project. Overtime some of this work is spread over Systems, that needs to be consolidated. I can easily do this from home (in silence) and by doing that, that reminds me of some re-documentation, that I always wanted to do. Another positive side effect is that I can cleanup old file or document shares, that store tons of dusty documents.

4. Business slow down / speed up people
Often I hear that Consultant have to time to explain or educate other people. Especially in terms junior S/4HANA consultant now it a perfect time to do that. Projects are on hold or slowed down, but that does not mean we cannot speed up with educating other people. I use a coaching approach with screen sharing. Working remotely with junior consultants and do some screen-sharing for initial introduction is fine. After that they can work on it and come back after some time (currently time is not as critical as normally it would be) for the next "coaching session".

5. Help each other and move forward
I my organization we already established internal knowledge sharing, which we call webinars. This helps us to spread knowledge sometimes to over hundreds of Consultants in no time. At the same time we receive feedback, questions or suggestions which helps us for further improvement. In the current situation this is a perfect approach, that we can continue and or improve without disruption.

Stay healthy
Marco