Category: Business & Culture

An SAP Template defines the company-wide uniform base configuration of the SAP system. Clear governance, version management, and structured change management are the cornerstones of a successful corporate rollout.

What Is an SAP Template?

An SAP template is not simply a copy of one country’s configuration deployed globally. It is a carefully designed core configuration that captures the common business processes across all organizational units, while allowing controlled local variations within defined parameters.

Ground Rules for Template Success

1. Define Template Ownership Clearly
Every element of the template must have a defined owner responsible for its maintenance, versioning, and the approval of change requests. Without clear ownership, templates drift into inconsistency over time.

2. Strict Customizing Versioning
All template customizing must be version-controlled. Changes to the template must follow a formal change process, with impact analysis performed before approval. The history of what changed, when, and why must be traceable.

3. Impact Analysis Before Every Rollout
Before any new country goes live with the template, a thorough impact analysis must identify how local requirements differ from the template core and what adjustments are needed. This prevents costly rework after go-live.

4. Clear Separation of Template Core and Local Variants
The template must clearly distinguish between global core processes (locked to local modification) and configurable parameters that can be adapted per country. This separation is critical for maintaining template integrity across rollouts.

Conclusion: A well-managed SAP template is the foundation for efficient multi-country deployments. The investment in template governance pays dividends with each subsequent rollout — provided the ground rules above are consistently followed.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

A Gallup poll from last year in German companies shows: 67 percent of employees make work to rule. The cause was the lack of leadership culture, of real self-evident characteristics such as esteem, respect, personal development opportunity and involvement in decisions. The damage to the economy because of the lack of innovation and frustration of customers was projected at around 100 billion euros.

Could it be that the current economic and financial crisis is the result of a wrong cultural development? Not a crisis of the economic system itself, but a crisis of a specific business and management culture that in recent decades has increasingly lost its humane orientation?

Cultural patterns are deeply embedded in organizations and are difficult to change. They are reflected in how people interact, how decisions are made, how success is defined and measured. When cultural patterns focus exclusively on short-term financial metrics, they inevitably lead to behaviors that are harmful in the long run.

Corporate success, in the broadest sense, requires a culture that balances multiple objectives: financial performance, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and social responsibility. Companies that excel in all these dimensions create sustainable value and are more resilient in times of crisis.

beteo believes that this insight is particularly relevant for consulting companies: We must not only help our clients optimize their IT systems and processes, but also help them build the organizational capabilities and cultural foundations that enable sustainable success.

The path to a healthier business culture requires courageous leadership, genuine commitment to values, and the willingness to measure success by more than just short-term financial results.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

There is no crisis in the financial market. That we need the financial market is clear anyway. There is no crisis of production companies too, because of course we want the benefit of their products in the future. There is also no crisis in the global economy since the wheel of history can not be turned back.

The financial market is about trust; in hazardeers and unscrupulous profiteers, it is hard to trust. Production companies, particularly the automotive industry, but also in pharmaceuticals, the crisis is about missing and false innovation. The global economic relations crisis is about the missing and the wrong political rules.

“Crisis” means, that there is something to decide, and not that something is running bad. The decision is, whether in our management training and corporations we want to communicate and hand down cultural values, which are quite unrealistic and only have short-term profits in their focus.

The crisis of economic culture can not be coped with probably in a few months. Cultural values must grow again: public policy and corporate social responsibility instead of unbridled profit, sense of justice and human measure instead of exploitation, lateral thinking, courage and creative innovation rather than business autism; international cooperation in the shaping of policy frameworks.

About the author: Dr. Michael Loebbert is Coach and Management Consultant.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

The article Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describes how on time and on budget execution and successful completion of complex projects can be realized. It requires clearly defined leadership process covering all people involved supported by software-based leadership systems.

Basically, the process of managing and driving project execution has three stages

• Leadership Initiation
• Leadership execution management
• Leadership Closing

Fig.: The three stages of the leadership process

1. Leadership Initiation

The execution of every project should be marked by a clearly defined initiation. Setting up the process on an intelligent, elaborate and accurately described base concept can save a considerable amount of time and money.

Initiation provides the project framework and defines the project guidelines, giving the project the actual go-ahead. A successful project start is crucial to the whole course of the project. Initiation particularly includes an exact definition and approval of the project. If the project scope including the individual goals is precisely and consistently defined, initiation is the valuable foundation enabling targeted work all daily leadership activities.

2. Project Leadership – Project Execution Management

The main phase is the actual phase where the project execution is managed. To ensure a highly efficient, proactive, and targeted leadership, it is recommended to base the leadership process on a standardized approach, a repetitive leadership process of measuring, evaluating, defining measures based on software-based project leadership system. Using both, leadership process and leadership system, has proven to significantly add to the chances of project success.

3. Leadership Closing

Every project must end with a closing phase. A deliberately scheduled closing resulting in an approved closing report avoids subsequent interventions. Apart from the closing report, the closing phase includes the acceptance by the client (e.g. customer, management), documented «Lessons Learned» and results that can be reused in next releases of the project or by other projects.

A proper closing phase is an important and highly beneficial activity in the organization’s Lifecycle Management process and discipline.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG , Wallisellen, Switzerland.  TimeWinner AG develops and markets the Internet-based Leadership $ystem TimeWinner.

The articles Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describe how project leadership systems support project and portfolio managers. The following list summarizes the advantages of the use of a Project Leadership System.

• Modern project leadership systems provide fast and efficient access to all leadership information for the leadership team – from project manager to steering committee.
• All leadership information is merged into one system, making the project leadership system the central source for leadership information for all project team members.
• The project leadership system maximizes the transparency of project leadership across all activities, times and open issues. Particularly, this lays open repeated inefficiencies. Transparency is also important when project leaders change; for Handover it saves time and money.
• Standardized, tool-supported and tool-enforced processes improve the attention of all people involved in and responsible for leadership and simplify the leadership task of driving execution.
• Intelligent interfaces allow relevant leadership data (e.g. master plans from MS Project or Open Workbench) to be imported into the leadership system.
• By using the possibility to connect leadership information and to define causal relationships, significant leadership scenarios or parameters can be traced back to the sources – a perfect instrument for modern risk management and internal control system.
• Formalized, documented and precise sources in the leadership system, make statements more reliable and secure. Project leaders are able to make precise statements referring to possible requests.
• All information is immediately indexed and permanently recorded. Redundancy is avoided.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

To support project and portfolio managers in their daily management of project execution work, Leadership Systems are used more and more frequently. Modern Project Leadership Systems offer predefined project execution processes which support the activities and decisions of the leadership team. In addition, they allow all relevant information (requests, decisions, risks, provisions, changes) to be centrally stored, contextually interrelated and preprocessed to support information needs of different steakholders.

Leadership System – Core Features

The most significant benefit of a Project Leadership System comes from mapping, complementing and supporting the leadership work. This includes all project tasks during the different phases, from efficient initiation, to complete documentation, to closure. Providing a basis for leadership, the Project Leadership System stores all leadership-relevant information including milestones (e.g. imported via an interface from MS Project), or goals and execution management cycles.

In the process of running the execution of a project, coping with an awful lot of decisions, provisions, changes, risk assessments and notes is one of the leadership team´s tasks. The total of this information is not only stored in the Project Leadership System, but also indexed. So causal and restricting relations are recognized and visualized, resulting in reliable statements as to the target and result scores.

From Leadership Meeting Support to Risk Management

The range of features of a Project Leadership System covers all phases from the support of leadership meetings, active change management, progress quantification, conclusive reporting, uninterrupted documentation, traceability of the leading activities, up to a sophisticated risk management.

Proactive risk management is gaining importance. Regulations have come into effect which call on enterprises to improve risk management and establish „internal control systems“. Such legal instructions can be comprehensively met by a Leadership System.

Can Leadership be Quantified?

Where is the project right now? What about target and result scores? Quantification is a significant factor in project leadership work. But can leadership be quantified? Modern Project Leadership Systems prove it! They include features offering business management and portfolio managers a variety of alternatives for assessing and comparing. They allow the definition of project leadership parameters relating to quantifiable criteria such as progress, cost, performance, motivation, and change management. Cross-enterprise benchmarking of project execution management is enabled.

Project Leadership Systems – Summary

A Project Leadership System is not only able to map the complete process of running a project or project plan to a single system, but supports all people involved in leadership with automated processes comprehensively, directly and flexibly. The resulting significant work relief and time saving can easily be verified. In addition to an increase in efficiency and project information value, there is more time to focus on the essential: the proactive, targeted leadership of a project.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

In order to meet time and budget requirements in complex projects and to accomplish projects successfully, clear leadership is required involving all project team members. At this point, software and Internet-based leadership systems are a great support.

It´s no secret to project managers, portfolio managers and people in charge of planning: According to new statistics, about 60 per cent of all projects are not successfully completed. „Not successfully“ in this context does not imply that the project failed altogether. The point is that the project management did not succeed in achieving the goals related to time, cost and quality. What are the reasons? Or to put it the other way round: Which are the factors leading to a successfully completed implementation of a planned project?

Managing a project means leading a project
The factors enabling successful implementation of a planned project are manifold and largely depend on the particular project. But there is one aspect which is crucial to success or failure of ALL projects: targeted and efficient leadership. This being accepted, is makes sense to give some thought to what leadership should be like, and how it should be implemented. Who has which competencies? Which methods are used for leadership? At which intervals do the responsible people meet? How does the management of pending items look like? Or is there maybe an explicit leadership methodology to be followed?

In order to support those in charge of planning, project managers as well as business managers in their daily work, so-called leadership systems are starting to get more commonly used. These systems systematically map leadership and leadership tasks related to a particular project. And, more importantly all leadership information is stored in a Leadership System, contextually interlinked and prepared to support the needs of particular target group.

The leadership system maps the leadership process
Usually, a person responsible for project planning works with a number of supporting software programs such as ERP systems, office applications, collaborative environment and project management solutions. As a result, the leadership information is often widely scattered in different systems making efficient and targeted tracking of data very difficult, for example when it comes to reproducing the reasons for a certain decision or a time delay.

How then can the process of leading, the action of leadership, be mapped and sustainably documented? In contrast to the different programs from which the leader gathers data and facts needed for decisions, the leadership system systematically maps the process of leading the project planning and answers, among others, the following questions: At which point of the project are we? How can we quantify progress and recognize, define and estimate possible risks and bottlenecks? How do we – in accordance with our particular Leadership Methods – usefully and permanently map changes, requests, decisions, events, risks or measures, all in the same place? As it is the leadership meetings that best reflect how leadership is implemented, leadership systems usually offer a variety of automated functions related to the planning, calling, conducting and documentation of meetings.

In the follow-up article Efficient and Targeted Project Execution (Part 2) I will focus on leadership meetings, proactive risk management and the question if there is a way of quantifying leadership.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG , Wallisellen, Switzerland.  TimeWinner AG develops and markets the Internet-based Leadership $ystem TimeWinner.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

We rely in the majority of decisions and actions on the cultural patterns of organizations, in which we live. Most of these patterns and values with which we steer ourselves are unconscious. Only rarely we object to them. Some individual patterns are actively learned by training or by serious “injuries”. Think about how you drive a car: You coordinate hand, foot and eye, adhere to the rules and respect the rights of other road users. Brain researchers describe this with the training of our synapses. “What has proved working and repeatedly gone through or what is equipped with high energy, engraves our actions and behavior.”

You have a wealth of experience that these organizational and individual process of coining patterns does not always run smoothly, specifically in companies and organizations. Not only that nowadays some patterns became dysfunctional, which most probably in the past were perfectly appropriate. Some organizational patterns, in particular how we act in power struggles or protect us from these like “devalue”, “dominate”, “intrigue”, “to put on ice,” “denounce”, “refuse to support”, “subject”, “threaten,” “spread  rumours” are quite indecent, even if they are individually applied not fully aware nor intended. To use words of Hannah Arendt, they are part of the “banality of evil”, as you find it even today in times of democracy and market economy (occasionally).

You rightly take this for a “moral argument”. Even if there is nobody personally to blame for: “Do not judge!” –  If leadership by example and effects of actions in organizations supplies and shapes the cultural patterns, an imperative can be formulated: “In everything you do or initiate as a manager, think about which cultural patterns you want to shape or make available for your organization through it.” This usually also pays off economically, as long as we depend in our value creation on cooperation, responsibility and creativity. And even if not …

About the author:
Dr. Michael Loebbert is Coach and Management Consultant and author of the monthly publication “Change Management Short Cut“.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

Perhaps you know the history of the PT Cruiser. Sure, you have seen this car on the street, the look is retro, fuel consumption is too high, technology and security are average. When Daimler joined in the responsibility for Daimler Chrysler, the PT Cruiser was just launched and taken for a flop. The production was driven down and banned into a small factory in Mexico. But it came different. The demand could no longer be served and customers were dissatisfied. – Today the PT Cruiser is a sales success.

A cultural fault! In the cultural patterns for car in the U.S. are freedom feeling and originality in the first place. The PT Cruiser meets these to a great extent. German and europeen values as technology and security are the subordinate.

Success of failure within enterprises are often depending on culture:

• Marketing. A product does not fit into a given market. – In Germany, the PT Cruiser was obviously never a winner .- Or the other way around: With new products presented cultural values no longer fit for the culture of the company. In the wake sales are stagnating.
• Strategic Alignment. Cultural values in a company  as “security” and “stability” do not fit to the new strategy, which “entrepreneurship” and “risk”.
• Corporate culture. From above announced corporate values such as “appreciation” and “enthusiasm” are not lived. –  In the past things ran very well with a certain “arrogance” and “skeptical”. – Cultural patterns cannot develop their potential, if stubborn management decisions take a different direction.
• Change Management. Change and development of the company fails to the tenacity of the existing cultural patterns.

Questions of culture are (1) cultural fit and (2) cultural change: How much fit is needed and how much change is possible? And if change cultural patterns is needed, how can this best succeed? How can the cultural potential of the company to be used?

About the author:
Dr. Michael Loebbert is Coach and Management Consultant and author of the montly publication “Change Management Short Cut“.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

Historically developed IT structure
Within their IT organizations, enterprises historically distinguish between project business, IT operations and IT development. In addition to these separate areas, there are several processes and systems for project requests, notification of incidents and problem management.

ITIL, PRINCE2 and PMI are Used Separately within their Silos?
For these processes, there are standards such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), PRINCE2 and the PMBOK of Project Management Institute (PMI). But the project management office (PMO) and the change advisory board (CAB) execute their requests and analyses separately. This way of thinking in separate categories creates redundancies and ignores the synergistic potential. Interdependencies and influencing factors are neglected.  IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) states:

„Change management is responsible for the control of changes within the productive environment. It is not responsible for changes within running projects. However, a close coordination between development project managers and the change manager is expected.“

From a project perspective, PRINCE2 and PMI require that operation must be included into planning. But the prioritization process in classical project portfolio management only covers project requests. Also change requests are only managed for projects. Neither of the two seems to be responsible. However, regarding them in isolation from one annother is a barrier to a holistic handling which enables a provisioning of IT services conforming with strategy.

An Isolating View has Negative Effects
There is no basis on which decision makers could define an order of priority for the activities between project business and IT operations. Although IT service management (ITSM) as well as project portfolio management (PPM) are already implemented and operated with a good process maturity level, the list of problems is long. Typical examples are:

• Repeated processing of the same objects
• Intransparent dependencies create higher risks
• Troubleshooting and project implementation are delayed
• Inaccurate planning due to lack of information
• Critical resources can not be optimally used
• Service level agreements (SLA) are defined only selectively
• Changes cannot be tested comprehensively

Comprehensive Service Portfolio Management is Desirable

• Would it be helpful to view and evaluate all requests and requirements?
• Could harmonizing the individual release processes (CAB und PMO) facilitate IT control?
• Would pooling of problems and projects increase efficiency?
• Could a holistic resource and schedule planning help to reach overall enterprise goals more efficiently?
• Would a comprehensive view on risks help to avoid failures of IT operations?

The Solution: Problem Portfolio as Part of Service Portfolio
For these requirements, there are no established standards. The following method of procedure helps to clearly improve the efficiency of IT organziations:

1. Establishing a problem portfolio

• Situation analysis of incident, problem and change management
• Definition of requirements for an overall problem management handling
• Definition of an integrative problem management process
• Harmonizing with incident  and change management
• Establishing a problem portfolio as a control instrument

2. Expanding and integrating service portfolio management

• Defining standardized evaluation criteria and weighting scales
• Determining qualification features of the different events (incident, changes, problems, requests, projects and so on)
• Synchronizing events with project portfolio management
• Establishing comprehensive analysis, release, planning and implementation processes
• Expanding project portfolio to become a comprehensive service portfolio
• Embedding problem portfolio into comprehensive service portfolio & project management
• Aligning resource planning comprehensively with IT

Summary
ITIL, PRINCE2 and PMI are highly useful frameworks capable of laying the foundation of an IT organization. But in order to challenge the „silo mentality“ and to take adequate advantage of them, they must be integrated with one another forming a holistic service portfolio & project management. Otherwise, they will be nothing but paper tigers.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen