I’ve been an SAP technical consultant for over 20 years, and these are the 5 most relevant skills that differentiate great professionals from the rest:
Autonomy
“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” is a classic in the SAP world.
My favorite way of describing autonomy is to perform an activity end-to-end. Someone assigns you a task, you take it, and deliver the complete solution. That doesn’t mean that you knew every step you took, but you solved every obstacle in your way.
Another good example is proactively proposing and testing improvements to the systems and processes.
Attention to detail
Errors in SAP are expensive. That’s why great consultants avoid them.
Working at big companies means that small mistakes have a huge impact. If you fail to consider an option or don’t test every possible case, you can send a program to PRD that will cause significant losses to the company. So, focus, attention to detail, and awareness when performing your activities are fundamental to avoiding stressful situations.
Making mistakes is inevitable, but you should minimize them as much as possible.
Business orientation
While other technologies are limited to technical aspects, developing in SAP requires a greater understanding of the business.
I’ve met excellent developers who had no idea what their software represented to the business. As long as you give them good specifications, they can create working and performant programs in no time. The problem, however, happens when they receive low-quality inputs or when they need to identify potential issues or make decisions without enough information.
You can be a good developer if you accurately transcript specifications into programs, but that’s not enough to stand out as an SAP technical consultant.
Organization
Methodologies are great when they work for us, but unfortunately, they often present more obstacles than solutions.
One of the characteristics of SAP projects is that they implement any trendy methodology in the market. Any professional incapable of adapting to that work model can be considered a renegade, which weakens their image. The ability to plan your work, estimate, delegate, and identify risks is a plus that you need to have to succeed as an SAP developer.
No matter the kind of project you are on, you must be able to organize your work and provide accurate status and plans to the project management.
Broad view
Focus on your work, but keep an eye on the entire system.
Not only because SAP often interfaces with multiple systems, but also because of the ample integration between the modules and projects, your program is always a tiny cog in an enormous machine. It’s too frequent for programmers to fix here and break there, or to fix their program but lose consistency throughout the system. To avoid making those mistakes, you should always step back and understand the impact of your change on the entire system before implementing any solution.
Even the most naive modification may produce a significant side effect.
As you can see, I haven’t mentioned any technical skills, and that’s because technical skills only allow you to become a good professional, but they won’t make you stand out.
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