Introduction
In my second blog about SAP Innojam NL (find the first oneHow “De Hoogvliegers” won the first SAP Innojam NL) I would like to reflect on the event from a more personal point of view. I’ll share my objectives and what has become of them. I’ll also write down anything that I think might be relevant for future Innojams. Some might call it an evaluation ;-).
Thanks
However, before I get into the details of what worked and what didn’t, first let me congratulate and thank all the people involved in the organization of this excellent event:
- rui.nogueira and his team of experts, consisting of jury member juergen.schmerder (River), chris.whealy and andre.fischer (Gateway), and martijn.tielen (SUP).
- The VNSG (Dutch SAP user group), and particularly Mientje Paais, Hans de Labije and jury member Rob van der Marck.
- SAP NL (for offering their location), represented mainly by keynote speecher and jury member Mark Raben.
- The volunteers from the Dutch SAP-community: robert.eijpe, Tim Burchartz, twan.vandenbroek, jan.penninkhof2, André Zandberg (and myself). Of these, Robert deserves a special mention because he’s the one that got the VNSG and SAP NL enthusiastic about this event.
Personal objectives
Like everyone else I had some expectations and objectives at the start of the event. In random order:
- Meet other people, and especially those who I’ve met on Twitter, but not yet in real life.
- Get access to and hands-on experience with SAP NetWeaver Gateway.
- Have fun.
- Learn.
- Write down things and may be even take some photographs for a later blog about the event (I’m not even remotely a photographer normally).
Well, what became of them?
Meet other people
Mwahh, I had not nearly as much time to talk to and get to know people as I’d wished. As for new faces, I met self-employed robin.vanhethof (@qualiture), a new father for barely 2 weeks and yet present at InnoJamNL (talking about commitment!), so I could congratulate him and see he was clearly a happy and proud daddy. I also met Fons van Nuland (@Fons_van_Nuland), a consultant of The Next View, tom.cenens (@tomcenens), of C/Tac Belgium and very active on SDN, and Oliver Lackner, sort of a colleague of my teammate Jeroen Huttinga (he’s an Austrian who, like Jeroen, has worked in Greece for years). For somewhat more familiar faces, I managed to sort of catch up with thorstenster (@thorstenster) and dakoller (@dakoller), whom I’d met during the SAP Inside Track Bonn last year, and with composite apps guru steinermatt (@steinermatt), all from Germany (did I mention already that it was an international event?). There were a number of others, whom I can’t all mention here: this post is getting long enough without them. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy meeting them of course. Still, it was mostly a matter of shaking hands, and saying hello or goodbye.
The conclusion must be that for instance an SAP Inside Track is much more suitable for informal discussions and to catch up with people. So I’m happy there will be one hosted in the Netherlands this year: SAP Inside Track Eindhoven, organized for the third year in a row, by Twan van den Broek (and others). It will be held on the last Saturday of November, the 26th.
Access to SAP NetWeaver Gateway
Well, as I’ve already written in my previous blog, there really was no good case to be made for using Gateway in our business case, which meant I got no hands-on experience whatsoever. Saturday morning, when SAP River was once again down, I went to Chris and André for some info/demo on Gateway, and instead got an (equally valuable) lesson in Javascript from Chris. But still, nothing on Gateway. So I’ll just have to make up for that in the upcoming (ramp-up) period.
Have fun
Finally success! 100% at least. No matter how many things I can think of that could have been better, or that should have been different, Innojam NL was very much a fun event, and if you don’t believe me, have a look at the photo’s.
Learn
Well, this one is easy too: you can hardly come away from this event without learning something. I got an introduction to Javascript (see above), learned of course a number of things about River, and heard some terms from the opposite side of the room, where Leon and Divya were busy trying to get the integration working between SUP and River. Last but not least I learned that I really have to brush up my presentation skills (well, I already knew this, but seeing oneself back on video is confronting nonetheless).
In order to also give something back to the community, I recorded a short video explaining how to send out a tweet from River. This is also meant as a response to richard.hirsch’s A SAP River Video Dare ;-).
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Prepare blog
You probably guessed it: I didn’t even start to take notes during this event. No problem though, as this was such an intense event, I remembered most of it even after a week. Clearly there was no need for preparations onsite. Another learning ;-).
I will conclude this blog with some random things that worked out and a few that in my opinion didn’t. Either way, I think it’s interesting for future Innojams to take note of these.
Good things about Innojam NL
- The choice to select the business cases from charity organizations does motivate people. This was best seen when, after the initial presentation of the business cases, some of which were even presented by representatives of the charity organizations, people got the opportunity to get a better understanding of the different business cases. Clearly, the tables with representatives of charity organizations were the most crowded.
- Pressure cooking: by making a competition out of it, people got really fanatic (okay, enthusiastic), and on average got done a lot more than they would have in a ‘normal’ project. The commitment was very high, as already observed by Rui and others, and as can be seen from the photo’s and video’s.
- Most of us work in a commercial domain, and by using business cases from charity organizations we got out of the ordinary business cases we deal with on a day to day basis, and we could work on some really interesting projects. Exemplary of this was that one business case of Philips, which basically entailed a high-volume billing engine, got no traction whatsoever. I’m convinced that had something to do with the fact that it sounded too commercial.
Things that didn’t work out so well at Innojam NL
- There was only one team that wanted to use NetWeaver Gateway, and due to technical limitations of the SAP-system underneath they could not even use it as they wanted to. This, in my opinion, is a direct consequence of the fact that the business cases were coming from charity organizations: there’s almost no charity organization running an SAP ERP backend (or CRM for that matter). The business cases reflected this, and so there was little need for Gateway. Looking back I think we could have anticipated this, and may be should have searched for a different SAP technology.
- It was difficult to get charity organizations to spend time with us (the organizing committee) to define business cases. In the end we did manage to get enough interesting cases, but it was a real hassle. Part of the problem was we didn't have much to offer them: in 24 hours you can only hope to be able to develop a running prototype, whereas in the end they really need something that (just) works, is supported, and is a real product (bigger scope). And they must be able to afford it too. Of course finishing the product after the event is possible, but it depends on individual people committing themselves to finish the work in their spare time. Besides, because some technologies were not even out yet, nothing was known about licensing costs or subscription fees.
- Not sure this one belongs here (I really liked helping to organize ánd participating), but as a consequence of bringing in business cases I had to present ‘mine’, and afterwards became automatically the owner of this business case. To be honest, I intended to go working on one of the other business cases, but didn’t have the time to figure out which one, as I was supposed to lead my ‘own’ business case. In the end this turned out alright though, since we decided to trade the original business case for the “Hoogvliegers” case, which turned out to be a good case to work on.
- There was not enough time afterwards to really understand what the other teams did to get their demo running. Of course, after 30 hours of Innojam it was only natural that everybody wanted to go back home (Saturday 5 PM), but nonetheless, after seeing all the demos it would’ve been great to have some time to discuss the implementation details of the different demos. I’m not sure how this can be realized though. It might be easier at an Innojam that’s immediately followed by SAP TechEd, since everyone will stay anyway.
- As I’ve said before, there really isn’t much time to catch up with people when they're working in other teams.
Final verdict
SAP Innojam NL was a great event, and I’m very glad we pulled it off. Still, there are a number of things that in my opinion are more suited to another format, so may be we should think about another type of event next to (certainly not replacing) the Innojam concept. I once proposed a kind of Code Exchange project weekend and may be that’s what I’m looking for here. It’s still a long road from idea to realization though…
