The Real Stars of Hollywood

Odysseus celebrates yet another birthday this week. I won't tell you when and I won't tell you how many Odysseus has observed in his all too short life but suffice it to say that birthdays are not quite as much fun as they used to be, although they are a hell of a lot more appealing than the alternative.

Be that as it may, this birthday provides a wonderful opportunity to detour a little from the posting I had originally planned and to reflect a little on what's important in life and how quickly it all passes. Time, even more than real estate, is one thing they make far too little of.

And project time is saddled with its own particular set of constraints, with so much to do and so little time to do it in. In my 13 years of SAP consulting, I can't remember a single time when a project went live on its originally projected date. Whether at work or at play, time always seems to slip away.

That's why your colleagues are so important. This is a real no-brainer: people are a lot more interesting than technology. Good people make good technology. And SAP, with its vast application vistas, its complex business rules, its obtuse German acronyms and its sometimes dense and uninformative help screens, especially needs good people working well together for a successful implementation.

It's not enough to be smart. I've run into too many bright SAP consultants, often fresh out of business school, who demonstrate a particularly infuriating arrogance inconsistent with the lack of practical business, technical or life experience they bring to a project.

Luckily, these folk rarely cut it. They have a tendency to offend the client and unless they have a critical skill, which they rarely do, are usually the first to go.

There was one European consultant I knew on a project in Asia who was Teutonic to the core. Let's call him the Continental. He stood out as a particularly engaging rogue. He oozed that smug, self-satisfied arrogance that some SAP consultants display as if it were a birth-right. It was as much a part of him as the meticulously stylish blue suits that he wore as un-self consciously as his skin.

Yet the Continental was a funny and likeable character whose company was always enjoyable. His real skill was a level of incompetence so monumental that it was actually very engaging. You got a perverse pleasure out of helping him through his daily round of bungling even if your only reward was his perennial exclamations of Scheissen …and … Idi-oht!

I've worked with a lot of German-speakers in my time but have never run into anybody who approached the artistic genius, the passionate disdain, embodied in the Continental's use of that pungent and oft-quoted German expletive.

Our cozy little 820 EDI build had no Continental to entertain us with his endearing brand of incompetence. But we did luck into an interesting and quirky cast of characters representing a complementary range of critical skills. But hey … this is Hollywood, isn't it? If you can't find engaging characters here they just don't exist. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

From the snowy wilds of Canada came the String Bean, a Sterling Technical Architect who designed and built the base technical and application architecture for our GIS EDI subsystem. He was fast-paced and brilliant, particularly in front of a white board where his ideas stormed out of his head in a non-stop stream of consciousness orgy of talking and sketching. I never saw anybody who could fill a white board with good ideas as quickly as the String Bean.

He had little to do with our 820 build but he did provide the base EDI application framework on which everything else was built. Without his efforts, ours couldn't even have begun.

There was the Map Lady from San Francisco. She loved to build and document maps with the Contivo Vocabulary Management System. The Map Lady is pure California: born in the Philippines of Chinese ancestry, her sister married a Frenchman who fastidiously sends his children to France every summer to ensure their facility in that oh so romantic language. His own genius bends towards the culinary arts: the Map Lady often regaled us with tempting descriptions of the gourmet cuisine at her brother-in-law's charming French restaurant in San Francisco.

Intelligent and generous with her talent to a fault, the Map Lady nonetheless has a superstitious aversion to the number 666. This came out on June 6, 2006 when she became spooked and flustered whenever I teased her with the date 6-6-6, which I did frequently after I realized just how much it spooked her. You're such a bad boy she would complain … and never once repeated the number.

And who could forget our SAP Accounts Receivables Guru who worked closely with me to flesh out the details of our evolving 820 design and had to go back again and again to face the users each time we had to make a change. He deserves a medal for his untiring patience and for the diplomatic skill with which he managed the expectations and anxieties of our users. We shall name him Doug.

An Indiana farm boy, Doug woke up one morning in San Francisco and said to his little dog: Toto … I don't think we're in Kansas anymore ... Not that there's anything wrong with being an Indiana farm boy but it's a role that Doug just wasn't cut out for. He's never looked back and every day he thanks the gremlins that haunt SAP for washing him up on the shores of the distant Pacific.

We were also lucky in that we had our very own personal ABAP programmer at our beck and call to help work us through our latest headache. I'll call him Raja because it means King and he was the King of the ABAPers on our project, excluding yours truly of course and I was told to keep my mitts out of the ABAP code, except for the design.

Raja was a youthful and endearing presence excitedly planning his first trip back to India in five years. While Raja put up with my design changes each time we hit the reality of our data, his parents were busily dreaming of wedding bells and grandchildren, appraising likely feminine prospects and casting horoscopes for an auspicious match in anticipation of his visit home.

There were many, many others, far too many to name here. Our users deserve special commendation. They had been thrust into a new and uncertain world from an old one that worked comfortably, and they were still responsible for processing and clearing tens of millions of dollars worth of payments each month. They were rightly anxious that the new system would work at least as well as the old.

And of course the larger SAP project, with a team that grew to more than 60 very bright and ambitious consultants and programmers, client IT personnel and business process owners and users working together to transform their Enterprise.

In the end it's all about the people and their jobs, the work that they do everyday that keeps our beloved Acme Studios afloat. These are the real stars of Hollywood: the ordinary and the extraordinary people that run and operate the business of the studio that generates the revenues that keeps the dream factory alive.