Business

So I recently listened to an audio book called “Thank You for Being Late”.  It was a recommendation from the Tim Ferriss podcast that I listen to regularly.  I didn’t really look at the description of the book, but I totally thought it was about finding time in our hectic lives to take a breath.  Well, the long I listened and waited for this, I finally realized that the title had little to do with content in the book.

Instead, the book started off by talking about how fast technology has been evolving.  One of the big take-a ways I got from the book is that we all need to get on a path of ALWAYS learning.  In order to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of work, technology and life in general, you need to constantly be upping your game.  For anyone that doesn’t want to be replaced by artificial intelligence, robots, or be caught in the “buggy whip business” while automobiles are driving around, needs to find new ways to stays relevant.

For me, I’m kinda going down three paths right now

The first is Udacity.  This is my long term learning.  Currently I’m learning JavaScript, but mostly so I can look at either a Machine Learning degree or something in BlockChain.  The idea is to learn enough about something else that I can have a backup plan if SAP falls apart.

The 2nd is my short term plan.  That’s doing stuff on OpenSAP.  Currently I’m doing some advanced Persona’s stuff, and I’ve done a lot for UI5 in the past.  The idea is keep up to date with new technologies in my own field.  In an ideal world, it’s skills I can use today in my consulting, and help to keep me marketable in the short term future.

Last, I’m back to Duo Lingo to learn a foreign language.  Not nearly has critical for work, but helps to keep my brain engaged, and also helps to achieve that goal of living in a foreign country for a month or so.

So, how are you keeping up to date in this fast paced world?  if you just shrugged your shoulders (like I did a week ago), take a look at some of the option above (or find your own based on your industry).  It’s amazing how much free or cheap learning there is out there.  I highly encourage you invest in yourself.

Thanks for reading,

I came to the realization the other day that I have an incredible life, but I don’t take the time to enjoy it.  It all sounds so easy, but if you are anything like me, you spend so much time, so much energy and so much emotion always chasing the next thing.  I use up so much of my life trying to get to the next goal, the next accomplishment, that I often forget to savor what I have accomplished.  As I look back at the past years, I’ve been so focused on building the software business, learning new skills, improving my products, that somewhere along the way I forgot how to have fun.  I would have brief excursions that might help me remember how to enjoy the moment for a day or two, but it would be quickly eclipsed by the months of uninterrupted work.

What’s the point of chasing a dream or accomplishing goals if you don’t celebrate what you have already done.  Now, I’m not saying to spend your life living off of the past.  You still need to be striving forward to something.  But you can enjoy your life every day.  For me personally, I’ve finally got better at the work life balance over the past month, but just working less doesn’t make you a more fun person.  I did an exercise a few weeks ago to come up with what makes me happy.  I struggled to come up with much.  I’ve used the business and my kids as an excuse, but it really all comes  down to me.  I personally tend to focus too much on big things like concerts, snowboarding trips, vacations, football games, etc.  What I lost somewhere along the way was enjoying everyday life.

My newest mission is to focus on enjoying life every day…  playing with the kids by playing like a kid.  Embrace the chaos of a little sugar in a 6 year old and a 3 year old.  Stop worrying about how loud they are, and instead join in the fun.  I know that I used to have fun side to my personality around here somewhere, but working too much and too much time focusing on everyone else’s happiness has made me lose that side of myself.  My goal is to stop spending my life being so serious, and just lighten up.  Easier said than done…  but you gotta start somewhere.

Do you enjoy your life?  If not, work on finding a way to enjoy it every day.

thanks for reading,

I recently heard a discussion that struck a cord with me.  Someone was talking about the difference between faith and trust.  The context I heard it was purely in a religious, but the message applies in any context.  Here was the basic premise.  Trust is believing because you have seen evidence to believe. For example, when you sit down on a chair, you trust it will hold your weight and won’t break.  Do you know that for sure?  No, but it may have been a chain you sat in before, or you saw someone else your size sit in the chair without any issue.  Faith is believing something without any reason. Heaven is typically the best example of these.  Countless people every day believe in a higher power and the belief in the afterlife.  No one that I know of has any proof of what happens when we die.  Yet billions of people have faith that if they live a good life, rewards await them after death.

What the hell does this have to do SAP or business?  Well, every entrepreneur needs a healthy dose of trust and faith.   First, you need to trust that it’s possible to start a business, make a profit, sell a product, make a product, etc.  Why trust this?  because millions of businesses have done this.  Not every business lasts forever, but all of the things it takes to make a business successful have been done many times.  In all these things you can trust.  Now, the faith is the harder part.  To make the business happen you need to have faith in your ideas, faith in your product, and most of all faith in yourself.  You need to have the faith that you can put in the effort to make the idea into a reality.  Faith that someone will buy your hard work.  Faith that it is worth it!!!

Faith isn’t easy, but it’s powerful.  Thanks for reading,

It’s funny, I really believed I’d be able to convert my ABAP Web Dynpro app (Renovation) to good old SAP Dynpro in under a week.  After all, the heavy lifting was done, right?!?  Shame on me for not remembering how the real world works.  So I thought I’d just pass along some of the things I “relearned” during this experiment.

1. Nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems.  Even though the back end stuff didn’t change, getting the correct screen formatting is still starting from scratch (but there will be more on this later).
2. Dynamic formatting is NEVER easy.  When I did the work in Web Dynpro, it took a lot of effort to get things to work correctly.  SAP Dynpro is no different.  It’s still creating lots of subscreens, and logic and containers, to keep things dynamic.  Every platform is starting over when it comes to screen design and formatting.
3. Creating functions to encapsulate existing logic (and prep for UI5) is worthwhile, but still requires a lot of re-examination.  I’ve had to relearn parts of my original app, just to understand what the hell I was originally thinking.  Don’t expect to remember why you did things…  and don’t expect all your choices to have been perfect when you did them them first time.  This goes for drop down menus as well as heavy duty functions to create documents.
4. Pay attention because maybe everything wasn’t working in the original the way you expected. I found features that worked great for 90% of the scenarios, but during this design I discovered some test cases that were previously missed.  So, if you do an adventure like this, use it as another round of testing.  You’ll end up with 2 products that are better.
5. DO NOT ADD MORE FEATURES – this one is tough for me.  As I start playing, I think of other new things I could just “throw into” the solution.  Instead, be smart about it.  Add those ideas to a list.  Just because you think it’s cool, doesn’t mean your customers want or need it.  Plus, it gets too easy to be sidetracked added new functionality, instead of just finishing the conversion.  STICK TO THE TASK AT HAND.

At the end of the day, these tips are just common sense in the design world.  But occasionally, even the best of us forget these simple lessons.

Thanks for reading,

Well, it turns out that writing e-books has really helped me connect with more people.  I’ve had a lot of people find me because of my books, and because of that I’ve felt like I’m helping people.  Which, at the end of the day is really my goal.  I’ve spent all of this effort in SAP Service Management, only to realize that everyone is just as confused about it as I was 10+ years ago.

So, as I begin to think about my next e-book, I would love to hear your opinions on what I should write about next.  Here are a couple things I’m considering:

1. Advanced Configuration – part 2.  This would go into more of the configuration available for service management/plant maintenance.  things like maintenance plans, service boms, etc.
2. A book about Service Orders – I did for the notification and the service contracts.  Would you be interested in something similar for the service order?
3. Warranty Claims – this one might take me a little longer write since I haven’t been using it as much recently, but still a fun experiment.
4. Variant Configuration – I’ve had a request to do a book on VC.

if any one gives me their opinion as a comment on my blog, I’ll be sure to send you a free copy when I finish my next book.

Thanks for reading,

Well, I have become the king of lists.  It seems to be the best way for me to get anything done.  Even my Mom knows that when I come to visit, if she tells me a bunch of stuff, I’ll get a few things done.  If she writes a list, I focus on getting all of it done 🙂  Well, I came to the realization this morning that right now I have 3 different lists that I’m working off of.  I have Remember the Milk which contains all of my scheduled tasks (things that need to happen on a certain date) or my recurring tasks, or my items I need to be working on.  Then I found another app called coach.me.  This was very cool, and it’s designed around keeping you accountable for each thing and saying that you will do something X times per week, and it gives you little high fives for meeting your goals.  Finally, I have my outlook inbox.  I have been flagging and color coding these items to show me what’s important in my inb0x.

Well, i discovered that I may have taken control of my inbox, but I now have 3 different check lists to be monitoring.  So, I figured out the next thing I can do to simplify my life.  Get myself down to a single to-do list.  My preference is Remember the Milk (RTM).  I’ve been using it for years with great success.  Coach.me was the first thing to go.  I only had about 6 different daily things I was tracking.  Two of them have become habits, so I removed them from the list.  Several items got added to RTM so they are recurring items.  Bingo… one down.

Outlook was a bit more challenging.  I have become very good at writing rules to manage all my incoming emails, but I needed to understand how I could send an email to RTM automatically, so it will create a task for me.  I found a post that explained within Outlook, you can press Alt+F11, and it will bring up the VB window.  It even had a simple script for me to start with:

Sub ChangeSubjectForwardProspect(Item As Outlook.MailItem)
Item.Subject = Item.Subject + ” <tagging stuff for RTM>”
Item.Save

Set myForward = Item.Forward
myForward.Recipients.Add “<my RTM email account>”

myForward.Send

End Sub

then, inside of the rules, there is an action called “call a script”.  I just had to pick this.  Now, when certain rules execute, instead of adding a flag, it will create an RTM task for me.  I’m still working on more scripts, but to start with, this is pretty easy.

Thanks for reading,

Well, I just found a fun little trick.  For a long time, I’ve wanted to be able to pull in IPad screen when I demo my stuff.  this way, I can show what it looks like on the IPad, what my iOS apps look like, etc…  but I never found a good method to do it.  I don’t know why, but I decided to look again, and I found a cool FREE app called LonelyScreen.  Just download this onto your computer and it allows you to stream using AirPlay.  So you don’t have to install anything on your phone or IPad.  Just this app on your PC.

Then just go to your IPad/iPhone, swipe up on the screen to get your quick controls.  Press AirPlay, then select your lonelyscreen.  This works great for apps, but I did seem to have issues when I attempted to do Videos or Movies.  Which is fine, I wouldn’t really be using this to watch a movie anyway.  Regardless, it’s a fun little trick to checkout, especially if you ever demo anything on the iPhone or iPad.

Thanks for reading,