welcome back, i do look forward to hear you enthusiastic approach to technology.

daniel

My only plea to you – please breathe new life into DemoJam. It was your baby but babies as we know grow up and have different needs. If you want some thoughts on that then feel free to ping me.

All in, I believe this is going to be a phenomenal year and a great time to be re-engaging. Hard to believe I know from one of SAP’s sharpest critics but then you know i don’t do BS.

Leave the naysayers to find their own way…that’s their choice. If they won’t be persuaded then there’s no point.

Big up the heroes, nurture the champions but most of all, enjoy the ride.

Just (bought and) read your book. Loved it. Somechapters a littleconfusing, though, but all in all readworthy. I just reminded myself about where in your timeline we got to rant and complain over the german ways…

Books like this is very inspirational, and might just be a trigger for someone else to do as well… Or not…

Rune

You are right it’s a massive failure. However personally for me it’s not worth getting upset over, because it’s not my failure. I think blogs like Dennis on the issue are the equivalent sticking a dog’s nose into something when they didn’t go where they were supposed to.

As much as you and I both(now that you have left) can tell folks what can/should be done, it still requires folks to act on advice rather than simply listen. Personally there were a lot of warning signs without knowing the technical issues, as in September we were still seeing wireframes(potential designs) and the golive was in November, yet the project started way earlier.

The only real problem I see happening from the delay is that a lot of goodwill was squandered not from people who will use SCN regardless, but from people who don’t contribute but had their mind changed due to see a preview of the new platform.

Take care,

Stephen

good post and finally an unbiased one. Well maybe you’re biased but the post isn’t

I happened to write a post that describes a guaranteed road to migration success (http://www.martijnlinssen.com/2011/12/migration-101-follow-white-rabbit.html) and would like to address Mark’s bullet points here:

Search Indexing – something that could have been discovered and cured weeks ago in a Test / Acceptance environment. Impossible to surprise people during go-live

Load testing – again, could have done this weeks ago in a Test / Acceptance environment. “full system under stress with all of its content” is a dead give-away that no full-size Acceptance test was performed

Delta content migration “This may only take a few hours, but is a critical few we don’t have” – Excuse me Mark, you don’t know how long Delta takes? Haven’t you rehearsed this? Don’t you exactly know what the delta is? A good message would be “We’ll have to move the delta to Monday because we can’t spare the 2.15 hours it takes within the current timeframe because fixing Search costed us an unexpected 3.5 extra…”

Blog issues – “Our customization needs additional work to fix, test, verify” is something that makes me cry and laugh at the same time. Bloggers who can’t log in, edit their posts, etcetera? This is clearly something that got squeezed in in the last minute and never, ever, tested before

Single Sign-On – again, once again, this could have been tested weeks ago in a Test / Acceptance environment

Security – “cross-site scripting is not resolved” is an indication of yet another last-minute newbie that never got tested properly

Functionality – “and we added or customized some of it” ahah! So here we have it. Funny how SAP seems to be tackled by what’s tackling their biggest projects: endless customisation spaghetti

The issues are in the wrong order btw, let me put them in the right order, and make up some content as I go along:

Priority – we gave priority to new functionality rather than proper migration. We vastly underestimated the amount of work involved

Customisation – we spent an enormous amount of time scripting and scribbling everything together and we just got lost at some point. We call it Security and SSO but those are justsome areas affected

Blogs – yes and all that affects blogging as well, of course. Just stipulating that so we have an extra bullet point to add to the list

Search Indexing – needless to say that we haven’t found time to spend attention to Search Indexing. Ticked another bullet list box though yay

Load testing – naturally we haven’t been able to do this and we really need to as the current “solution” doesn’t look remotely to what we have in mind – who knows what are last-minute functionalities and fixes will do to Performance?

Delta – TG for another bullet point although we really had to squeeze this one out

Sorry if I let my fantasy go wild there and please don’t forget to smile and laugh in between, but I do think this last order is closer to cause-and-effect than the first one: that one is directed towards usability and audience

I’m an SAP outsider to the max, and so are many others whom I’ve talked with about this. Judgments vary from FAILURE via embarassment to public humiliation. Just saying

Last but not least: this seems like a typical banana project that is so common among ERP and CRM vendors. (Banana gets sold when still green and has to ripen at client’s expense). Again, I am under the impression that way too much components got fit together in the last minute, and never test-migrated. Sure there are issues but not of these kinds