Being a consultant is easy. You create a website, get some business cards, and hang out your shingle. And in some cases, you’ll do ok.
Being a great consultant is much more difficult.
The Bottom 80% that make the Top 20% Possible
There are several SAP BusinessObjects forums that I visit and monitor regularly. It helps me keep a pulse on what our clients might be asking for, as well as the general direction of the Business Intelligence (BI) industry. I had to chuckle to myself when I saw the following post (I’ve removed some of the details to protect the guilty):
NEED HELP! My company got hired to build some Business Objects and we need to know how to import the data into a “universe” and how to export universes to Excelsius dashboards
After picking myself up off the floor, I thought about a few things that were way wrong about this:
- Who in their right mind would hire this company, when they obviously don’t know the first thing about SAP BusinessObjects? (No, seriously. I’d like to know. I think there’s an opportunity for a clean-up engagement here.)
- Data isn’t “imported” into a universe. The universe, which is generally the foundation for all things SAP BusinessObjects, is a powerful semantic layer that sits on top of the data. Had these “consultants” known the first thing about SAP BusinessObjects, they certainly would have stumbled across that realization.
- They spelled Excelsius incorrectly, while also stating that universes are exported to the dashboards. Again, this is simply incorrect. Query as a Web Service (QaaWS) utilizes the universe model as a semantic layer to populate data for Xcelsius, but there isn’t any “exporting” being done.
I recognize that forums certainly have their place, and we’ve all turned to Google from time-to-time when we’ve gotten stuck on a problem. I get that, and see nothing wrong with seeking help or confirmation — occasionally.
What bothers me is that these “consultants” would be giving those of us to take our profession seriously a bad reputation. Every step of the way, they’d reach out to Google or some forum for help…and in the process waste their client’s time and money. All because they took on a project where they have absolutely no experience. In addition, their failure to properly implement SAP BusinessObjects for the client would also leave a black mark on SAP. I’ve seen this a number of times before.
My intent here isn’t to publicly call these people out, as tempting as that may be. Rather, I want to call attention to how critical it can be to choose the right partner for your SAP BusinessObjects implementation, migrations and development projects (or any other project, for that matter).
In an upcoming post I’ll talk about the attributes that I think make someone a great SAP BusinessObjects consultant. Until then, try to make sure your pulling your hired talent from the 20% bucket.
Question: What do you look for in a good SAP BusinessObjects consultant?
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 9:06 am
Concur with your post. I usually blame the companies who hire these “consultants” for a poor vetting process; 15 minutes spent on Google(!) will usually lead you to some info on the “consultant”.
Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 5:47 am
I Totally accept the facts written by Ryan,..
I was talking to an MS Candidate in US, and when i asked her what she is going to get trained on, She said, FICO,. and i asked her the version what she is working on or being trained on, She said , she is not aware of it,. And final question is,. i asked her if she has ECC installed. She said, I only need FICO, why ECC .. hehe. isnt this funny,.
Most of the FICO consultants might not be knowing the architecture/landscape of SAP Environment.. hhhmmmmm…
Niha.