Given 5 minutes on the net, you can find out which plumber to contact, who wont rip you off or which insurance broker, which car salesman, doctor, dentist even which priest to bury your cat but take as long as you like and you wont find a single way of truly assessing an SAP consultant.
Odd really, when you consider that SAP consultants almost only work in high profile companies such as the fortune 100 – maybe the fact that there is no way of checking if a consultant is any good or not, is the reason the unprofessional consultants continue to find work at the cost of the many hard working SAP consultants out there.
Imagine if every SAP consultant was made accountable for their own actions, even their own reputation….. how would that work out for the unprofessional – would they work hard to become professional experts or would they hide behind the fact, that it is considered “unfair to stop people working” regardless if they are actually worth hiring in the first place?
Personally I have a suspicion it may be easier for them to hide and explain how it is very unfair to be assessed – but does that mean that these same people will not check which plumber, doctor etc would serve them best – I would doubt their theory would extend to that so…
Here we all sit, with most companies around the world having a list of consultants they would never use again, mostly denying this list exists, because that would be unfair to the poor souls, and we are unable to create a single ‘do not use’ list for the same reason – fantastic, so how do we deal with it?? Should we continue to let these consultants take the work from those who can actually do the job? Should they sit at home while an unprofessional consultant messes up yet another project?
or…
And this is just a thought, is SAP consulting standards something that is important enough that there should be a single global point of reference, where no consultant is called bad (in case we offend one of them) but instead the professional, hard working SAP consultants are able to prove their skills and ability and receive the recognition they so richly deserve, and what’s more the contracts they deserve too.
Now, if there are any costs involved or even more than a few minutes work, there would be a reason to not bother building a reputation – after all, what’s a reputation in SAP? Well, actually, like every other profession it should be very important!
If you are going to assess someone’s SAP reputation, you need to have a standardized way of doing that – SAP skills alone are not enough to judge – a consultant who is unprofessional or doesn’t communicate, can be just as much trouble as one who doesn’t know their work.
OK, three questions – SAP skills, professionalism and communication all point scored between 1 and 5, with comments – should give a good assessment, but add to that their attended SAP courses, their CV, location and language skills along with their availability and ideal role, you suddenly have a pretty holistic view of the consultant.
Add to that, certifications from SAP, TOGAF, MichaelManagement, ERPtips.com etc…. verified to ensure each claimed certificate information is reliable.
That leaves us with a global site, where every SAP consultant is responsible for their own reputation – so how will that help removing the unprofessional SAP consultants? If a consultant requests a reference from someone who knows they are unprofessional, they simply wont give a reference – they could cheat and get references from friends or people who should not be giving a reference, to stop that we would need to manually and randomly check the references and referees.
Each consultant would need their own unique “Badge of Excellence” complete with their Id Number, so customers can check the consultants references instantly, fr.e.e and without even signing into the site.
What is described here is a cut down version of the past 4 years work – there was a lot more – like direct contact with consultants and customers involved, but this gives you an understanding of what and why www.ConsultantBox.com came to be.
We are already in conversation with SAP AG, SAP USA, HP, Logica, Cap Gemini, PWC, Accenture and the SAP user groups around the world, we continue to take and receive contact from companies globally and we would like to invite you to join us in this cause too.
If you believe that SAP consulting standards are important we invite you to join with us – regardless of being an SAP customer of consultant join us (Free) in pushing this message home and making the unprofessional improve or simply removing them from the SAP industry – would that be a cause worth 2 minutes of your time?
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