How to Retain Your SAP Staff!

At this point in the SAP support organization staffing process, you have spent countless hours building an elite team capable of carrying the company through the transition from a legacy or old system to a new enterprise-enabled solution. Or maybe you’re like thousands of other SAP customer sites and are simply interested in preserving your excellent team! Either way, this section is for you.

Why go to so much trouble to write about staff retention? Simple—you really don’t want to spend your time, money, and other resources training folks for other companies. And that is exactly what happens when staff retention becomes something you plan to do, rather than a mindset embraced every day. Other companies will steal away your best resources, leveraging all of the experience and training dollars you have sunk into your finest people.

This practice of wooing away the “best of the best” represents business as usual, and is a common plight in today’s world. But you are not powerless—if you understand what motivates your SAP team, you can reduce attrition from a flood to something less than a trickle.

No, I’m not crazy! I have SAP customers who have had practically no attrition in their SAP technical support and SAP Basis/DBA teams in over five years. Yes, five years. Let’s take a closer look at how they have managed to keep their best people through the high-dollar/high-demand years, and how they continue to keep their teams motivated and productive today. Pay attention, or risk keeping only your slackers, as your high flyers move on to bigger and better things at your competitor’s SAP sites.

Understanding the Two Key SAP Support Staff Personalities

Remember earlier in this chapter when we discussed SAP skills personalities? They ranged from “new project/high stress” personality types to “maintenance mode/low stress” types. In reality, no one is truly one at the exclusion of the other. In fact, most employees represent a mix of the two. But there is much to be gained in understanding what motivates each personality type, and how to use this information to the benefit of your SAP project. For example, employee and contractor turnover is hugely expensive when transition time, new-employee ramp-up time, formal training, and other on-the-job training is factored in. And a team’s morale can suffer long-term damage if new projects, tasks, or assignments are delegated to the wrong team member. It is therefore important to note that a project can simply not be successful if only one type of personality is represented by the team, as we see next.

New Project Types

If your SAP implementation was performed exclusively by New Project (or NP) personality types, you would probably finish the design and implementation ahead of schedule and under budget. These folks work hard, love to learn, and typically thrive under pressure and deadlines. They embrace change, too, making them perfect candidates for SAP implementations and upgrades.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside (as always!). Some of the trade-offs associated with employing a team of New Project types are as follows:

• They tend to be the most challenging to work with, as they are typically accomplished and experienced, with an ego to match.

• NPs tend to get bored with repetitive tasks, so they would not be happiest in operations and on-going support roles.

• NPs might be inclined to put off documentation and other such details, interested instead in “making it work” or “setting it up” and then moving on. If you value timely and precise documentation, you may therefore be disappointed. NP types prefer to churn and burn, leaving documentation to their support/maintenance colleagues.

• NPs find little value in standing still. As such, they need to be kept busy with projects and assignments that challenge them, force them to learn, and generally push them out of their comfort limits. If you can’t do this, they’ll find an employer who can.

New Project types make things happen. But as I alluded to in the preceding list, when things are more steady-state, you will need to begin transitioning a different kind of SAP technology person into your organization. That is, as the SAP TSO matures even prior to Go-Live, a good balance of both New Project and Support/Maintenance folks needs to be achieved.

Support/Maintenance Types

The weaknesses of the New Project type tend to represent strengths of what I label Support/Maintenance personality types, or SMs. SMs are simply motivated by and attracted to different things than NPs; neither personality type is necessarily better than the other. For example, SMs prefer regular hours, less travel, more routine or scheduled tasks, and proven documented procedures. They thrive in operations roles, and generally pick up the slack for their New Project colleagues. The results I have seen in the field include:

• SMs often become long-term and loyal employees (or in some cases, long-term contractors).

• Steady and dependable, these folks show up every day and often represent the “core” of an IT organization.

• Support/Maintenance types are less apt to embrace change as quickly as their New Project counterparts, however.

My recommendation is simple—for a new project team of 20, bring on perhaps ten of each personality type, keeping in mind that five of the NPs will probably transition into new roles or areas as your project nears Go-Live. An excellent transition from an R/3 implementation, for example, might include moving some of these New Project types into roles supporting new SAP BW, APO, or Enterprise Portal deployments. Or, if you’re intent on Internet-enabling your enterprise, a position with responsibility for designing and installing SAP Web Application Server or Internet Transaction Server solutions makes sense.

As long as you understand what motivates your team, and take action to meet these needs, you’ll be that much more apt to maintain your organization. NPs and SMs complement each other in a symbiotic kind of way—it’s up to the various SAP TSO team leads and project management folks to ensure that the balance of NPs to SMs reflects the state of the project.

Communication—Keeping It Regular and Meaningful

Good communication is essential right from the beginning, during the interview process, and never really takes a back seat in an SAP deployment. The team kick-off meeting or new-employee introduction to the team sets the stage for formal communication; subsequent regular “stay in the loop” meetings reinforce how important sound verbal communication is. Finally, weekly or even daily meeting minutes, or details as to who attended a meeting and the subsequent action items discussed and delegated to meeting members, represent a critical written communication forum. Other written forums include regular status updates collected from each team member and assembled into a single SAP TSO-wide status update. Collected every Monday or every Friday, these often serve as agendas for further discussion, or to ensure that action items are indeed addressed and “closed out.”

In all of the time I have spent in countless meetings and conference calls with SAP customers and partners, I feel the following few points are most worthy of the ink in which they are printed:

• Show up on time, and start on time.

• Meetings must be short enough to stay focused, and long enough to cover the material to be discussed.

• If no action items come out of a meeting, the meeting was a waste of time in the first place. Avoid these! Meetings perceived to be a waste of time will be infrequently attended, and thus will serve less and less purpose over time.

• If no one documents the action items (that is, via meeting minutes), there is a better chance that they will not get addressed. Action items promote accountability in that they tend to remind the responsible parties that things need to happen before the project can move into the next phase.

• If no one is assigned to take meeting minutes, and publish these to the team within a day or so, less will get done. The person calling the meeting is ultimately responsible for documenting the meeting minutes (though delegating this task is common).

• If no one follows up on the status of action items out of meeting minutes, they are less effective, too. In most circumstances, I like the idea of the meeting organizer using the previous meetings’ minutes as an initial agenda for the next meeting. For increased efficiency, it may be better to decide on a review schedule for each action item, such that subsequent meetings don’t have to address each and every status item, only the ones scheduled for review that day.

• Take the time to document all but the most obvious of acronyms in all communications—I am usually in awe of the number of three-letter-acronyms assumed to be universally understood by customers, partners, and vendors.

Remember that regular communication instills confidence in and within a team or organization. And because they allow the team to be involved as a cohesive unit, regular productive meetings and other communications forums tend to promote improved team morale. In essence, you are more apt to feel like part of a successful team charged with a mission, and therefore happier, when regular meetings force action and ultimately progress.

Finally, there is also a link between communication and staff retention in the form of visibility of accomplishments. Most everyone enjoys a meeting where their own accomplishments are noted and praised. Similarly, checking off action items and other to-do’s via posted meeting minutes makes accomplishments visible, and ensures that an individual’s effort is noted and acknowledged.

Salary Requirements—Just the Beginning

I would be remiss to not talk at length about fair compensation plans, leveraging mySAP market and technology conditions to reward low supplies of these folks with high dollars, and so on. Here it is, then—pay your folks fairly, and review salary levels at least annually.

In the real world of SAP consulting and project work, I have said for years that a good salary motivates people to show up at work for only a few weeks. A good raise might even keep someone’s interest another week or two. But it’s a short-term motivator at best. After that, it’s up to the SAP project manager and TSO leads to stay on top of what motivates their team members to continue to excel in their positions. Said another way, pay is an excuse for leaving but not a motivation for staying. One essential key to this is understanding and complying with the “most important thing,” discussed in the following section.

The “Most Important Thing”

Have you ever been told “good job!” by someone who sincerely valued your effort? Words of appreciation like that often do more for morale and team-building than any annual raise or Christmas bonus. Sure, we all show up at work to get paid, but what really keeps most of us the happiest is encouraging words of thanks and appreciation. I like to refer to this as the all-important “attaboy” or “attagirl” approach to reducing employee turnover. Sincere and warranted positive feedback means so much to everyone.

Of course, like anything else, if too many attaboys are tossed around, they will lose their significance. A smart SAP Project Manager or team leader will use these just enough to keep them both unanticipated and “special.” And the best project managers and team leaders will understand that timing is everything, and do their best to deliver timely well-deserved attaboys.

One way to keep one-on-one attaboys from sounding canned is for a Project Manager or Lead to give the attaboys publicly, increasing a member’s visibility to his team and with regard to the SAP project in general. In doing this, the PM or Lead is putting his people before himself, taking a potential risk by implying that a component of the project’s success is less the result of his own personal contribution than it is one of the team member’s. In my eyes, this makes the Project Manager or Lead that much better to work for, though the following guidelines must be observed:

• Public attaboys need to be given to the person or team actually responsible for completing the work or achieving a particular milestone. Doing otherwise risks infuriating or disheartening others.
  
  
• No real good comes out of praise that is distributed for political instead of performance reasons. It’s simply better left unsaid, as the team tends to know the truth anyway, and personal credibility is therefore tarnished.
  
  
• If a person is predisposed to giving public attaboys, he needs to ensure that they are distributed between different teams and different individuals. This should be easy, as no mySAP solution was ever single-handedly implemented. Doing otherwise can easily damage morale.
  
  
• Too much public praise, like private attaboys, loses its impact.
  
  

Performance and Other Incentive Bonuses

Performance bonuses are great for motivating behavior aimed at meeting goals or deadlines. For example, it’s not uncommon to hear about things like $5K, $10K, and larger bonuses being handed out after SAP Go-Live. Similarly, cash bonuses and paid time off are also popular ways of rewarding the individuals responsible for meeting key SAP project milestones, like the completion of the SAP stress test, or rapid configuration of a development environment.

Many other incentives exist, too, like providing training. In the next chapter, I address training the SAP Technical Support Organization in detail. In this following section, though, I cover how to leverage this promise of training to not only bring the right people on board, but to help keep much of the overall team intact.

Training Opportunities

Holding end-of-project training out like a carrot in front of a hungry rabbit is becoming more and more common in SAP projects today. The idea is simple—help make a project successful, and you’ll be rewarded with the opportunity to learn new technologies, mySAP.com components, or functional areas so as to assist with the next “big thing” at the company or client site. What really pays off with this kind of approach is patience.

It has been my own experience, for example, that sometimes the tasks required of a particular technologist for a particular project become mundane. Maybe the technologist has set up 10 SAP/Oracle clusters in the last year, and they just don’t really challenge him any more. Or maybe the technologist has yet another solution sizing that needs to go out the door for yet another prospect that’s only leveraging the particular vendor for better pricing from yet a different vendor. In these cases, the excitement is gone, and the SAP technology honeymoon is over. Our technologist, if he is a Support/Maintenance type, might be quite pleased with his role. A New Project type, however, would probably love to move into a new technology area, or get involved in a new project. Enter now the promise of new training and new future work or project opportunities for the NP. This could very well be enough to keep an individual committed and on schedule with regard to the current project.

Career Pathing

Like training, the promise of a new career in SAP is often held out as a compelling reason to remain in a particular SAP support position until specific project milestones or Go-Live or something beyond this is achieved. Some of the best “career pathing” I have been privy to includes:

• Building on a DBA’s value by adding SAP Basis and other SAP infrastructure skillsets is quite common.

• Extending the SAP Operations team’s responsibilities to include the implementation of basic change management waves introduces them to SAP Basis.

• Adding incremental skillsets to the SAP hardware/OS team, like Storage Area Network support or high-availability network support, provides great career advancement opportunities for these folks, and gives them another reason to stick around a few more years.

• Providing SAP functional on-the-job-training to your senior SAP integration people is a great way to push them into the realm of business-oriented support positions.

• Rewarding outstanding performance by increasing someone’s level of responsibility and moving him into a Lead position also increases his visibility within the organization.

• Moving SAP Leads into more senior management or other leadership roles of greater responsibility also promotes the idea of career pathing.

The best companies to work for use sound career management as a matter of “business as usual.” It makes sense, as it represents one of the best win-win scenarios in the employer/employee relationship. The company retains its talented workforce while leveraging the skills and experiences of its own people in different organizations of the company, and the employee meets his needs for recognition and advancement in-house.

Other Compensation Alternatives in the Real World

Although positive feedback, bonuses, training opportunities, and the promise of career potential certainly motivate most SAP professionals, other compensation alternatives play a key role in maintaining and retaining staff. I think very highly of many of these, and count myself lucky to have participated in quite a variety of interesting “compensation alternatives,” like those in the following list:

• One company my team and I supported for three months would surprise the SAP war room folks at least once a week with a catered lunch. Both the company and the individual consultants benefited greatly. We ate for free without messing around with lunch-time traffic and lines, and the company got an extra 30 minutes of productive time, not to mention the benefit of informal meetings over lunch and the improved morale and loyalty that only really good New York style pizza and subs can provide.

• During the daily status meeting, and usually some time during the middle of the week, one of our SAP Client Project Managers would start the meeting by handing out a new $100 bill to the member of the team who solved the nastiest customer problem that week (or achieved some other notable goal). Regardless of the reason for the award, if you’re looking for a way to get everybody to your meeting on time, this method works! Even a high-dollar SAP consultant likes a new $100 bill.

• An SAP Basis manager I know of would take the whole team out for an incredible no-expenses-spared steak dinner once a quarter. It was always an event to look forward to. And because this guy loved to eat, there was never any pressure to skip dessert. Or eat in a hurry. Or even go home.

• Another client of mine in a very rural part of the Midwest insisted that we, as consultants, get the “good rooms” at the local hotel for our short SAP infrastructure upgrade project. As it turned out, the town was something of a resort in the summer, but nearly emptied out after snow started falling (in September!). And the “good rooms” wound up being enormous suites with huge televisions, high-speed Internet access, and yes, gigantic Jacuzzi-style tubs.

• Another SAP Project Manager I know enjoyed treating different members of the team to an afternoon of non-competitive golf at any number of expensive or select club courses. He did a really good job of getting around to bringing nearly everyone on the team at least once. Not only was it a great way to put off work for half a day (because the work never actually goes away in the world of SAP consulting or support), it also provided each team member the Project Manager’s ear for five or six hours.

• An SAP customer support center with which I worked used the “SAP Engineer of the Month” award as a means of rewarding the team member who demonstrated unique troubleshooting or problem-solving skills. Although the honor was nice, the best part of the deal was a paid parking spot next to the client’s downtown building. Believe me, it was a coveted award!

• In a twist on the preceding example, one company would give the “SAP Consultant of the Week” two tickets to the city’s NBA basketball team when they were playing at home. Even though the team was in pretty sad shape that year, it was still a fun and yet very inexpensive way to break up the week.

• Sometimes, just having a nice ride makes all the difference. Some of my favorite clients provide (or at least pay the expenses for) convertibles. After a 14-hour day doing transports or preparing for the installation of an SAP production cluster, there is nothing quite like throwing the top down in a rental. The beach, the highway, Sunset Boulevard, the middle of downtown Cleveland, near the Bay in Frisco, or along a lonely stretch of backwoods in Canada all become that much more exciting in a ragtop.

• During the two weeks prior to Go-Live, one client of mine sprang for lunch every day. The only rule was that we could never go to the same place twice. We wound up sampling probably every kind of food available in this small town—what a great couple of weeks!

• Finally, one of my absolute favorite places to work insisted that every Wednesday be declared “Aloha Wednesday” during the nine months prior to Go-Live. Why Wednesday, you ask? For maximum turnout—all of your consultants are in town Wednesday, whereas many will opt to leave early if you hold this kind of event on a Friday. Aloha Wednesday equated to half-day work days, volleyball, plenty of liquid refreshments, BBQ chicken or hot dogs or whatever the budget could spare that week, and just plain ol’ camaraderie. It is amazing how many technical and business issues can be solved while barbecuing chicken, or out on the volleyball court. Good times, good times.

Other kinds of compensation alternatives abound, too, in terms of very simple and inexpensive regular rewards systems. You may prefer, for example, to treat your SAP project team to “consumables,” like gift certificates, tickets to the latest movie, and similar one-time-use rewards. Vouchers for $50 meals at really nice or interesting restaurants can be a lot of fun, too. The following are some examples of small gifts and tokens or appreciation that can go a long way in building and maintaining team morale:

• One company gives out weekly awards for the cleanest and messiest work areas. Prizes vary from flowers to gift certificates to company logo shirts and other merchandise. The owner of the messiest work area gets a broom or other such token that’s rotated from week to week, and they provide the gift for the following week as well.

• Another gives a rotating crystal plaque for the SAP team member of the month, with the name of the latest recipient etched below names of previous recipients. At the end of the year, a ceremony “retires” the plaque, where it is hung next to other IT and similar group awards near their break room.

• A large SAP hardware vendor’s enterprise marketing organization used to treat its SAP Competency Center to regular tickets to basketball and hockey games, with the caveat that they take a customer or other key member in a partner organization to the game with them.

• Another favorite SAP customer of mine brought in donuts, bagels, or something similar practically every single morning during the project. Oftentimes, a huge pot of coffee would show up as well.

As you have seen, there are plenty of ways to motivate and ultimately retain your SAP Technical Support Organization. When staffing is completed for the core positions discussed in this chapter, and processes or practices are put in place to keep these core folks on staff, you can begin in parallel looking at planning for the selection of the SAP Data Center location. The tasks associated with planning and designing the data center are covered in Chapter 10, “Developing the SAP Data Center.” First, though, in Chapter 9 we will take a closer look at the training requirements that must be completed by the SAP Technical Support Organization.