Blog It Forward – Andre Sousa

My thanks go to  Lukas Weigelt for BIF to me from his BIF Blog It Forward – Lukas Weigelt because he considers myself as “unobtrusive most of the time on the forums” but can make myself clear and straight to the point when opening a discussion. Thanks for the compliment by the way! Here we go!

About Me

I was born in a small (but very interesting) town in the center of Portugal (Viseu), 28 years ago. Then, when I was 18, I went to Porto to get my masters in Informatics Engineering at University of Porto. When I finished my masters in 2008, I moved to Lisbon where I started working for Deloitte as an SAP Consultant. I worked for several clients for 2 years: it was a very tough and challenging period with very hard projects (short deadlines and the usual pressure you find in a big consulting company). During this period I was able to develop a lot of connections with clients that made me become a freelancer in 2010, working for a few clients. One year later I had an huge opportunity to work abroad (Madrid, Spain) in a multinational project for multiple countries in Europe and I accepted! Since then I have been working for multiple countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium, France) as a freelance around Europe on SAP ESS / MSS, FITV, Performance Management, Recruiting, Training projects. Actually I think I am lucky to be able to work abroad but come back to Porto (where I live) during the weekends. Porto is an awesome city, one of the best places to visit in Europe:

Here I am on the left margin of Douro river with Porto on the background. When you come to Porto remember to taste the famous Porto Wine: one of the best wines in the world.

During the past few years I was able to experience many different cultures around Europe. For example, when we had a go-live on the year end and I had to stay in Madrid between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I found out that Santa was still rocking on the streets until January 6 which is a public holiday in Spain (Epiphany).

What do you like most about your job with SAP and what situations can make you furious?

Honestly I like my job with SAP because apart of having challenging projects, I think experience working as SAP Consultant gives you several opportunities to work. As so, when you finish your job in a company you might get other project easier than if you worked with other ERP / technology. Due to financial crisis in Europe now it’s harder to get a job even in IT and SAP might give you some “security” on getting a job.

However there are situations that can make me mad when implementing a SAP project specially on the amount of solutions SAP is delivering for each topic and changing every year (because I think they are not very sure on which path they want to go): for example on SAP Portal, SAP delivered a few years ago SAP Portal with WD Java then moved to WD ABAP and now they are offering SAP NWBC… which is good for consultants because they can have more projects but sometimes it’s difficult to recommend properly our clients. They say “why didn’t you tell me that we could use NWBC?”… have you experienced the same?

What do you enjoy doing most in your life? In your free time, besides work that is?

I really enjoy to practice sports. Actually I usually go for swimming during this summer on a outdoor swimming pool next to work. This is awesome because I used to swim in a swimming club when I was in Portugal and during this period I can go there to relax a bit after work. Here it is the swimming pool I am talking about:

Here it is… relaxing huh?

And that’s it! Now I want to Blog It Forward to:

• Jan Thomas Nygaard, helped me a lot on SCN forums with valuable suggestions!
• Siddharth Rajora, moderator of the ESS forum and one of the best contributors in SCN with large experience on every topic about ESS!
• Ankur Jindal, also helped me on my open discussions in SCN!
  

Thanks to you all guys!

Questions for you (if you like):

• What would you do if you didn’t work on IT? What would you do for living?
• What do you enjoy doing most in your life? In your free time, besides work that is? (I will repeat this one as well)