SAP Mid-Month Go-Live: Got the T-shirt

Conventional wisdom says you don’t go-live with SAP financials in the middle of the month (strictly speaking I should say the middle of the accounting period, but I’ll say month as a generic term for the posting period).  I recently went through a mid-month SAP financials and logistics go-live and so far it has been a success.

Initially the project team had the expected you-can’t-do-that reaction when the idea of a mid-month go-live was suggested.  We took three main steps to determine whether or not we were crazy or had a viable go-live option:

  1. We asked SAP.  As one of the main participants on the project we got them to do an internal review with some platinum consultants with the objective of telling us why we could not go-live mid-month.
  2. We asked our project team, both client and consulting resources.  Again, the goal was to tell us why we couldn’t do it.
  3. We Googled like maniacs to find something to support and justify the conventional wisdom.  We failed to find anything substantial that would deter us.

Armed with the conviction that there was no reason we couldn’t go-live mid-month we set about defining the details of how we would pull it off.

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SAP Project Management Consulting Clichés – Part 2

Following my previous post I got a couple of responses from folks out on the interweb and decided I’d steal their suggestions and expand on their consulting clichés.  After all repetition and overuse are the start point for any cliché and this means I’m doing my part to sustain the cycle – reuse, recycle, renew!

Is Your Project a Hotbed of SAP Consulting Clichés?

I felt compelled to come up with a 2-by-2 matrix to help you decide whether your project is cliché generator or a cliché consumer.

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SAP Project Management Consulting Clichés

There’s an old saying (aren’t they all old?) that instructs you to avoid clichés like the plague.  SAP has generated its own set of overworked buzzword terminology and has an eco-viral-collective that churns out more and more each day.  I can hardly keep up with the acronyms.
Over the years I’ve accumulated three favorites of my own that I’d like to share.  The aim here is not to kill off the clichés, instead it is to suggest ways to head them off before you use one and have clients rolling their eyes at you–Or at least have a quick follow up so that the cliché actually has some value.

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Welcome to the SAP Project Management & Project Observations Blog

Introduction

Welcome to my SAP project management and project observations blog.  I’m Tim Cooper, an SAP FI/CO certified consultant with a lot of project management experience.  My goal with this blog isn’t to make you PMP certified or to address all and any project management issues you may have.  Instead I’m going to share some of my experiences from various projects – some good, some not so good – with the hope that you can make your project more successful.  At times I’m going write about subjects that will feel like it is project management 101, but I haven’t stopped being surprised by how often my assumptions have turned out to be incorrect and need to be reconfirmed.

I hope this blog is helpful to consultants and non-consultants: it should help you understand some of each others’ expectations and make working together a better experience for you both.

Let me know what you think, but please be civil.