Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

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Some things you need to know:

SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software.

SAP is priced based on your company's revenue. In industry X typical spend on IT is y% of revenue, so SAP will charge you a project for an amount equal to y% of your revenue.

SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but common for large projects). Making sure that in case the project fails it is the customers fault will be strategically taken into account from day 1.

SAP's revenue is for the large majority based on consultancy and education revenue, not on software sales.

SAP's data and business process model maturity varies extremely depending on the industry and business segment. This will not be clear in the sales trajectory and not easy to discover upfront.

SAP is a fairly closed ecosystem. Typically consultants are recruited straight out of school and never leave the stack as it is very different from the rest of the industry. It has it's own cultute and habits that do not travel well outside of it's niche.

> SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software.

Plenty of terrible corporate software works like this. Precurement has a checklist of features, and that list never includes "Has great UX", because only the people on the floor has to use it.

I'm looking at you JIRA...

> SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but common for large projects). Making sure that in case the project fails it is the customers fault will be strategically taken into account from day 1.

I was a consultant at a major software consultancy for the better part of three years. No matter what, it is always the costumor's fault, even when it isn't.

Paying a customer back some 100 billable hours worth of payments is simply just not feasible, when a large part of consultants have less than a years worth of work experience.

While you sit down and talk about the project with senior and managing consultants, you are being deluded with a completely skewed perception of the base level competence of those that will carry out the work.

The higher hierarchical "level" a consultant is at, the less implementation work they'll do, because associates will take longer time doing the same tasks and will therefore sell more billable hours.

The entire T&M consulting industry is economically incentivized to produce organisations that shirks responsibility, while simultaneously work on "too big to fail" projects, because that's where the money is at.

> SAP is a fairly closed ecosystem. Typically consultants are recruited straight out of school and never leave the stack as it is very different from the rest of the industry. It has it's own cultute and habits that do not travel well outside of it's niche.

Not to mention that it has its own programming language. I had a colleague that worked as a SAP consultant, and she said it was horrible. Features like "variables names can consist of at most 8 characters" certainly didn't help.

> I'm looking at you JIRA...

I always see this comment on HN, I think I have been using Jira for a decade, never really had any major complaints.

Right! Jira's pretty great. Sure it's clunky sometimes, especially with it's bastardized version of SQL, but whatever, it's non-coder friendly.

If you guys think JIRA is bad you should check out BMC Remedy...

If you want to go further back in time you can check out IBM DOORS. Though it does have some great features you see shoehorned into Jira these days.

> looking at you JIRA

I dunno. I find Jira pretty easy to use, like Git. Focus on the main fields/commands and open a new ticket/clone again if you mess up.

/s

Agree 100%. The whole "management consulting" industry is rotten and all of the "Big 4/5" accounting firms suck. There are boutique consultancies that do excellent work but so many CIOs will go with Accenture et al. because of their name and perhaps because they perform their annual audits, etc.

BTW, on the last point - ABAP (SAP's proprietary language) has improved a lot over the years. Variable names are no longer so short (a vestige of the R/2 mainframe days) and the language has adopted a lot of features from Java and JavaScript. Not always the best (OOP like it's Java in 1998, woo!), but definitely a lot better than in the past.

Work for a small consultancy. Our project's manager at our customer fought with others so they don't force him to get Accenture. Their argument was "when the project fails and we have taken Accenture, then it is not our fault". The project would most probably fail with Accenture..

Currently the customer is very happy with our development speed and unhappy with their Accenture project's speed

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