Some of you might have seen Hugh McLeod’s picture about producing something “amazing”.

As it happens, today I had a work discussion that touched on just that. We were faced with the choice between something that ticks the “timescale” and “achievement” boxes and something that ticks the “appealing” and “users will love it” boxes. Suffice to say what the obvious business decision was… once again, Quality was Job One.

I see this at a lot of SAP sites. The implementation team knows that users are not particularly happy with the system, but everyone seems to be getting their work done, so why do things different? The SAP team therefore focusses on the measurable part, the quality. They might even say: “Hey, SAP is standard software after all. If you want to have fun, install Garageband on your own machine at home!”. I used to say that, too. But not anymore. Because things have moved on.

So here are some key points to all of those who oversee developments and have the power to decide whether a development should do same-old-same-old or push some boundaries:

• trust your senior developers, let them “loose” every now and then
• use prototyping to explore new areas once in a while
• not everything has to be done in SAP GUI (or downloadable into Excel, for that matter)
• send your team to events such as TechEd
• have the guts to defend your team’s efforts and ideas in front of your superiors