Should you be certified?

Thanks for your strong views on this. Pushing this discussion is important. When I posted those original Tweets, I thought I might get a reaction, but it was your views that really provoked the good debate. Certification is a hot button topic and like most such topics, I find that views polarize too often. Usually the best route is somewhere down the middle.

I've been a long time advocate of field experience over SAP certification in my writing, but that's mostly because all the aspiring SAP folks reading my stuff tend to get roped into this idea that certification will lead them into the promised land of a highly paid SAP career without much effort on their part. Obviously that's not the case. Excellence in SAP means total dedication and you can't "credential" your way into this field.

Dennis, one of the things about your argument is that project failures and the need for certification are getting lumped together. Personally I think it's a bit better to separate them to a degree. The reason being that SAP projects, when they fail, fail for a variety of reasons that tend to implicate all parties, from overzealous salespeople to a lack of internal investment in training to poor project management by either the internal PM or the external PM. And sometimes companies feel a need to blame external software for internal flaws in the business model or execution. The caliber of consultants has relevance to this discussion, but to me, certification isn't central to the dissection of problematic projects. Except maybe for BPX certification. More on that shortly.

On the other hand, if you want to take this discussion back in time to project failures in the 90s, I do believe a shortage of qualified SAP talent did contribute to project problems during that time - in a big way. However, certification was not the central issue there either. I placed hundreds of SAP folks in the 90s and I can tell you that certification was almost never a good indication of consulting talent. Believe me, when I placed someone who was certified in SAP but who didn't live up to expectations in other ways, I heard all about it.

I will say, though, that the consultants who had multiple certifications, like 5 to 10, did tend to be impressive, because in that case the amount of certifications reflected a total commitment to SAP and a real passion for excellence.

In my view, the biggest weakness of the traditional SAP consultant is that the technical folks tended to lack "big picture" business skills and awareness, and the functional folks tended to work in "configuration silos" without a broader view of the business process or a deeper technical know-how. The premium consultants were not like this, but there were never enough of those to go around. Others were not pressured to achieve such excellence because they could get great rates doing what they always did. The market pressures are different now as we all know.

Since the 90s, the amount of talent has increased and SAP has greatly improved in many ways, including a better implementation methodology and a user community ready to share lessons learned either here or on ASUG.

Since SAP certification did not ever do a good job of measuring the consulting qualities I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago, and since many certified consultants I knew were not necessarily that effective, I don't tend to see certification as a cure-all for SAP project woes today, and I know you don't either.

However, what is interesting is that the description I made of the flaws in the traditional technical or functional consultant is directly addressed in the BPX certification curriculum. Therefore, I see the BPX certification as especially important, as it is a means of formalizing the crucial areas that both technical and functional consultants can work to improve. And it would be a great certification for a younger professional, with a few years of experience perhaps, but looking to build.

I'd rather put such a young person through a BPX certification than an SAP Financials certification anyday. The Financials stuff they might pick up another way, even in a book, but the BPX certification would provide a real roadmap for future learning and expansion into that well-rounded consultant that is so important.

As I mentioned, the best consultants were always on top of many of these BPX skills, but I think the new BPX certification, and the BPX community as a whole, is highly beneficial to this whole discussion of project challenges and improved quality of consultants - SAP's stated consulting services theme of 2009. I'm certainly not the first one to suggest that BPX certification and awareness can make an impact on IT projects. I know Mario Herger brought this point up on a podcast I did with him, and Marco ten Vaanholt has mentioned this before during presentations also.

Also, I will be more and more of a fan of the SAP certifications as more field experience is incorporated into them somehow, as you suggest. I'm not saying this will be an easy task. But I think there must be ways of making the certification more real world accountable. The new three tiered certification is a good way forward along these lines. Someone from SAP can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that SAP's top tier, the Master level, is going to include a field experience component (the Master level is not yet available for most areas of SAP as far as I know, please correct me if I'm wrong).

The Associate level certification (lowest level of new three tier), which is the equivalent of the classic SAP certification, has never made a huge impression on me simply because in so many years of evaluating consultants, it never really seemed to be the key to who was a difference maker on client projects. However, the second tier, the Professional level, does strike me as more rigorous. I'd love to see the Professional level certification acquire more prestige as it gets more recognition in the SAP world. And as for the Master level, as one poster alluded to (can't see the names from this comment box), it would be great if SAP eventually achieved a Cisco level of prestige affiliated with that level of certification, or if not on that Cisco level, at least something with super clout!

This is probably way more thoughts than anyone feels like reading, maybe I should have done this as a blog entry instead? If I should move this to a blog entry let me know.

I have mixed feelings about SAP emphasizing the importance of certification to customers at this point, only because most folks are still only certified at the Associate level. I worry that hiring becomes overly simplistic when certification is the central point of emphasis. I would just hope that if SAP is going to emphasize the importance of hiring certified consultants,
SAP will also emphasize the importance of hiring well rounded consultants with deep industry experience, good soft skills, full life cycle experience, training and change management, business know-how, and some techno-functional skills. Yes, core technical and configuration skills are important too, but technical interviews are a better way to determine that, in my opinion, than an exam.

The reason is that a technical interview hones in on a particular person's qualifications for that project specifically. Certainly SAP customers who are not sophisticated in an internal competency center deserve and need quality support in such technical screening.

Oh, and one more thing. I think SAP should be emphasizing to its customers also that "community involved" consultants are the best ones to hire! As I Tweeted the other day, as a general rule, the better the network, the better the consultant. Nathan Genez made this case in a podcast I did for SAP BPX, and I totally agreed. If SAP is going to emphasize the importance of certification, why not also suggest looking at the extent of the community involvement of the consultant? I know I'm a much better SAP contributor based on dynamic back-and-forth of this community. Who can argue with this point? I guess a counter-argument would be that this is tough to measure, but I would say that it gives at least as good an indication of quality as a test score, if not more!

In sum, there's no one simple answer, but I believe in the BPX skill set as it is being defined and evolved. To me, right now, that's more important than anything. Give me ten of those kinds of consultants anyday! A BPX certified consultant - even cooler! Especially in this era, where most of the strictly technical or functional boilerplate work is going to be outsourced anyway, which presents a different case altogether in terms of best practices in management.

I read through the whole comment thread again, great stuff.

A few key points from what I've read:

1. Size of network not important, it's community involvement that matters.  Martin English made the response my point about community involvement: "be careful what you wish for" re: having thousands in your network. My view is that a consultant that has a community orientation and involvement usually will be more effective. NOT about size of network...perhaps I can elaborate on how this could be evaluated at another point to make it clearer....which leads to:

2. Mark Finnern and James Governor are onto something, regarding the formalization somehow of peer evaluations. Note that ASUG is trying to do this for firms and individuals in terms of customer evaluation and accountability via ASUG Edge also, though that's too early in its rollout to offer many lessons yet. Maybe this kind of thing supplements certification or becomes a part of it, but whether SAP Mentors are involved or not, the notion of peer and/or customer review/recommend/accountability seems appealing to me, though with hurdles to think through. But clearly transparency and public respect mean something. Though I'd be wary of a simple solution like LinkedIn recommendations. It's not that hard to stockpile solicited recommendations.

3. Vinnie's comment via Dennis on accountability at the firm level "re: bulk loading of consultants." Not sure whether certification requirements help to address this either, but I will say that SAP customers should be vigorous about not accepting bulk on-site consultants. Each one should be screened according to their own specs and or an appointed outside technical screening partner they trust. Whether consultants are certified or not, hiring in my view should always be individual. It was not always that way, and in my view, that was part of the problem with the implementations that did fail in the '90s.

4. Darren's view on customer effectiveness of certification - Darren, very interesting point regarding independent evaluation of whether certification has had an impact on success of projects to date. Would be great data to have. My personal hunch is that the answer would be: minimal impact at best, but if the data contradicted that it would be useful to know. Even a 10 percent positive impact is still impact. I think the more rigorous higher levels of SAP certification might eventually have a bigger impact. But not widely adopted or used yet, too early for a study on those, so any study would just be for the "classic" certification and would not shed light on effectiveness of the two new higher levels.

- Jon Reed -