Category: Work

The floor which we were in on Thursday for our preparation had even fancier technology in the meeting rooms : big screen projectors descending from the ceiling at the touch of a button; and little microphones on the table to speak into for those conference calls where someone is always too far from the phone or speaking too softly.   Andrè our presentation coach was at it again, and we went through several dry runs.   We also went through a list of anticipated questions, and practiced who would answer, and what we would say.  By 5.30 pm, the five of us that were going to present to the client on Friday, piled into a van with our luggage and all.  We had to pick up our 6th team member at Toronto airport, and then headed out to the town of Chatham where the gas utility company’s headquarters are.  No fancy hotels there; we stayed in a Comfort Inn (which was very comfortable given that I only got 5 and 6 hours of sleep the previous two nights).  Friday was going to be a big day.

We spent all day going over our presentation materials, and we had a coach to critique our presentation methods as well.   Said he :  ‘I know it’s not easy, but you have to boast a little and sell yourself!’, and remember : at the same time the client should feel they want to hire you, that they want to work with you (so don’t come across as arrogant) !   I spent a little time after work walking around the office in downtown Toronto, but then had to go back to the hotel and catch up on my sleep.

It was Labor Day here in the USA and Canada, but there was no rest for the wicked (me).  We have our work cut out to meet a deadline on Wednesday for a proposal that my firm is making for a big two-year project.  In  the meantime, I’m off to Toronto tomorrow to go and sit in on another proposal, for the so-called oral presentations.  It is somewhat like a job interview and therefore a nerve-wracking affair, but I’m just there to answer to technical questions they may have. Others in our party are familiar with the terms of the contract and the bid that we are making.  I even went shopping for a new pair of pants or two, and ended up springing for a snazzy new jacket as well.

Here’s my coaster that matches the beer I had Wednesday night with my amigos in the Columbia City neighborhood.  (No, I did not win the jackpot.  So I will keep my job, write my blog and count my many blessings with regards to health and friends and family).   Check out the GEICO commercial with the camel roaming the cubicles, asking everyone if they know what day it is.

I had to get up with the birds on Tuesday – at 5 am, to make sure I was ready for an important 6 am conference call.  But what was that noise outside? Light pellets of hail like we had the other day.  Amazing.  Anyway, let me jump in the shower and wash my face, I thought. The directors I talked to were in Chicago, I only had a 5-minute slot with prepared remarks, and I did not want to sound like I just rolled out of bed!  Conference call over with, I went back to catch another 30 minutes of sleep.  My stomach was still a little queasy from something I ate the night before,  but I had to head out to the Red Lion hotel in downtown Seattle.  It was the location of a rare event : my firm had most of the 400 or so of the Seattle team attend a whole afternoon workshop.  So I wanted to attend and see all the faces and meet lots of new people.  Done with the workshop, we could get refreshments and socialize, which I did as well.  To socialize is hard work for me, since it does not come quite naturally the way it does for that ‘business pro’ guy in the National Car commercial that mixes business with .. business.  Then it was time to catch the bus up the hill to kick back and make some dinner.  Yay!  I made it to the end of the day.

I read the front page article of Thursday’s USA Today with interest – the one that describes how mobile technology is liberating us from the office but killing our personal lives.   I can check my e-mail and messages anywhere and anytime .. and the minute I open my notebook computer in my study (or in the kitchen), my virtual ‘office’ is right there.  I suppose that is why I see some people in the airport carry two phones : one for work, that you can just turn off at times, and another for personal use.

I have just gotten a brand spanking new notebook computer for work : a Lenovo T430, an upgrade from my T420.  It’s all black and all business with a 14″ screen – large enough for work but not so heavy that I cannot run with it to catch that connecting flight.  The keyboard on the new machine has gotten an engineering make-over as well. The T430 has ‘island style’ keys which have bigger flatter top surfaces.  The intention is to provide a larger ‘sweet spot’ for those with clumsy fingers (mine) that have never had formal touch-typing training.

The consultants have left the ‘salt mine’ in Salt Lake (City) for the week, so I am at the airport and about to board my 2 hr flight to Seattle.  It’s been a tough week with more all-day workshops, but we think we made a dent and in the words of the project manager ‘earned some respect’ from the workshop participants.  (Pictures were added Friday morning).

This sign of a Sinclair* gas station with the cure brontosaurus logo is at the Country Corner stop in Ogden.  My colleague and I were filling up the rental car with gas before heading to the airport.  So! We have Week#1 of the project behind us. It took a lot out of all of us. For three days in a row we had 6 hrs of workshops, starting at 7 am sharp – connecting with a slow wireless connection to our SAP system half a continent away, and representatives from other sites across the USA dialing in on the phone.

*Sinclair Oil Corporation is based in Salt Lake City, founded in 1916. It is a fully integrated oil and gas company – meaning that it engages in the exploration, production, refinement and distribution of oil and gas.  It operates two refineries (in Wyoming), about 1,000 miles of pipeline, and some 2,700 gas stations.

The project team is going out to the new sites to provide support for the new users in the system.  The map shows two of the three sites where the new system has started up : Taishan and Yangjiang.  I stay put in Dameisha to provide support from a central place (at the offices at Daya Bay).

Four of us worked late Friday night with the ‘Basis’ team (they provide technology and systems support).  But in between work we had time to dash out for a dinner close by in the ‘expat’ village here by the nuclear power station.  The wall decoration is from the restaurant.   This Friday is no Friday anyway, because we work Saturday and Sunday as well .. but then Monday through Wednesday is Qingming Festival or the Tomb Sweeping holiday.

It’s ‘go live’ weekend for us.  The ‘box’ is the server with the SAP Production system on. ‘We’ are the project team and all the SAP objects we bring with us into the Production system.  The list of items is long : among others new companies, new plant codes, new organizations, new users, new reports, new interfaces, new master data sets and new system functions.  As with most SAP projects it’s been a long and winding road – but we have now arrived.  Now it is up to the users to jump in and start to swim in the blue SAP screens in the next few weeks!  That is what they have been trained to do, and we will help them.

We’re in the final testing phase of our SAP project, and some ‘dragons’ have emerged that have to be slayed. One can even find – as we are – that standard SAP transactions are not working as expected. It all depends on the volume and combination of data that had been converted and the system settings and resources that have been put into place. So it pays to be paranoid when testing software*.

Test it again even if it was tested before (in a previous phase of the project), even if it’s out-of-the-box functionality from a top-notch vendor and even if you ‘think’ it will work.  Of course, no project has infinite resources, so you have to apply what time and personnel you do have, as best you can !

*I am thinking of the Andy Groves quote ‘only the paranoid survive’. Grove was CEO of Intel from 1987 to 1998 and a pioneering figure in transforming the company into a giant.  He insisted that people (working together) be demanding on one another, and is said to have been an idol of the late Steve Jobs from Apple.

I am using the Audi Locus 2011 Concept Car as a metaphor for the SAP system we are building (both are German systems, after all).   Yes, our system has zeros and ones – not nuts and bolts – and is not as shiny .. but we are putting the finishing touches on the Construction (phase).  Next up are the final rounds of Testing.   So team members come up to me and ask ‘Can I change the instrumentation panel?’ No, you cannot – then the training manual for driving the car will also have to be changed.  ‘Can I change the tyres?’ No – we don’t have time for testing the new ones.   ‘Can I buff the paneling one more time?’  Alright – but please don’t scratch it !  .. and so on.   As with building a house or finishing up a painting, it can be hard to stop .. but you have to. Tinkering further with it, risks damaging it.  Stop it!

‘Impress your boss in China’ says a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article (picture from article), with some pointers.    So of course I could compare notes with my own experience here.
Greetings :  (Bloomberg) Reach for your boss’s hand first.   (Me)  It’s last name then first name, and use the full name, preferably with a title.   So Jiang Wang would be mister Wang Jiang for you, mister !
Business Cards :  Receive with both hands and have yours ready to give in return.
Numbers : 4 is bad and 8 is good.
Food :  Just eat it!
Hand Gestures :  This one I still didn’t know (yikes) –  do NOT use your index finger to point or gesture.   It is very rude.  Use your whole hand.
Smoking and Drinking :  This I know very well – at dinners one can get away with not smoking;  not so with drinking!
Feng Shui :  Explains the square ‘dragon’ holes in buildings.

One more.  The article fails to mention the important concept of ‘losing face’ in business relations.   Avoid confrontations, and the ones that would make someone look bad in front of his boss or colleagues,  almost at all costs.  (Come to think of it, this applies almost anywhere in the world).

This post is late!  That is because our project here in China is approaching a major milestone : the completion of the development work.   So we are fighting many dragons. Along with the development effort, there are test scripts, training materials, data clean-up and data conversions, security settings and system backups to keep synched up.      We have the big items in place, but the list of smaller ones is a long one, a long tail*.

*[From Wikipedia]The term ‘long tail’ has gained popularity in recent times as describing the retailing strategy of selling a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy.  Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

We are (almost) done playing in our Sandbox system and now hard at work writing Functional Specifications.    Functional Specifications will be used to write Technical Specifications, and then SAP’s programming language will be used by our development team to write code.    But wait!  Is SAP not pre-coded, packaged software?  What needs to be coded, then?  Well, we are tweaking the way the standard system works so that the screens and the functions make for a better fit for the business environment.

So what could be tweaked, and what should be left as is?  Ahh : that could be a matter of fierce debate!  As an example : on the classic Work Order screen below, changes on the HeaderData tab’s layout should be avoided.    That is just too radical.  It will confuse users that have used SAP elsewhere, and make the Germans ask Was ist denn hier los?!  What is going on here?  if they are called on for bug fixes or support.  But it should be fine to have the system do additional checks for the accuracy of entered data, depending on which one of the ‘System Conditions’ was selected.

Our ‘Sand box’ system is ready!  The ‘Sand box’ is an SAP* system (database and programs) where we can make a mess and figure out which solution is the best before we work in the clean ‘Development’ system.  Then comes the ‘Quality Assurance’ system where final testing is done, and only then do you transfer your work to the Production system : the one that is used to run the business.    *Don’t say ‘sap’!  Say ‘S’ ‘A’ ‘P’.  In German it stands for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung (!) and in English simply ‘Systems Applications and Products’.

I discovered today that there is an app for that as well : accessing SAP on one’s iPhone and iPad*.   The screen shot is from Apple’s app store – the same SAP Easy Access menu I see here at work every day, except it’s in German ..  Büro is Office and Anwendingsübergeifende Komponenten would be Cross-Application Components!    SAP was founded in 1972 but the ‘SAP Easy Access’ menu only came about in 1999.   At the time SAP launched a project called ‘Enjoy SAP’ to improve the user interface and usabililty.   Part of this initiative was due to the large number of American companies complaining about SAP’s ease of use.   In SAP’s hallways this was referred to as ‘the American problem’.  

* Not that I’m loading it on my phone!  But it shows that companies running on SAP needing field workers to obtain or submit information to SAP could deploy it to iPhones and iPads.