Design Thinking activities around SAPTechEd Amsterdam

In this blog post I’ve tried to collect all activities and sessions to be held at and around sapteched_amsterdam which are somehow related to design_thinking .

Introduction

A couple of weeks back I tried to submit an expert networking session about my own (very limited) Design Thinking experience so far and I had to choose a suitable track. Possible choices where:

• SAP Technology Innovation and Strategy
• IT Management
• Enterprise Analytics
• Real-Time Data Platform
• Process Integration, Integration and Portal,
• Custom Development
• Security, Identity Management and Single Sign-On
• Mobile

Mmm, not really what I was looking for. To be honest, there’s now(!) also a category “Default items” available which at least helps to avoid the wrong suggestion. There were more boxes to be checked, like choosing SAP Products concerned (mandatory field, so each TechEd session should be about a product?!), Topics, Hot Topics (really!), but still there was no way to indicate that this session was about Design Thinking. Which is kind of odd, given that SAP is implementing this stuff pretty vigorously internally as well as externally.

Anyway, by lack of a way to make the design_thinking content searchable I decided that the next best thing would be to provide a separate overview of all things related to  design_thinking. So here we go:

Overview Design Thinking activities & sessions

More details

The first Design Thinking activity will take place well before SAPTechEd itself: the first day of SAP Innojam is dedicated to the design_thinking methodology. This will be on Sunday Nov 3rd. You can sign up for SAP Innojam while registering for SAPTechEd, or standalone here.

Next up will be an awareness workshop about Design Thinking that Julia Dorbic and myself will be conducting at the Holiday Inn (near the RAI) on Monday afternoon Nov 4th. This could be the right choice for you if you don’t want to spend the weekend doing work related stuff (aka Innojam) and still want to experience what Design Thinking is all about. You can find details (incl. possibility to register) about this workshop here.

As you can see from the overview above, at sapteched_amsterdam itself Wednesday is Design Thinking day: from 12PM to 2PM there are 4 sessions scheduled consecutively about this subject. All sessions will be held in Lounge 1, so if you’re interested, make sure you reserve the full 2 hours to learn and discuss as much as possible!

Here is a detailed description of these 4 sessions:

EXP10240 (& EXP10241)

Find out about the results of the Design Thinking workshops around SAP Certification & Education which took place in SAP Walldorf & provide feedback by sharing your thoughts on improving SAP Certification & Education.

EXP10205 (& EXP10204)

How to facilitate field service engineers, that work in a highly complex environment, in their work? That’s where Design Thinking comes in – user centered design. A real life story on how to integrate 20+ individual tools into one new working space.

EXP9899

Let’s have a nice talk about Design Thinking. I will share some information about the projects I developed in the trainings that I have attended.

EXP10526 (& EXP11026)

Join me and DT consultant Julia Dorbic from D-Labs for a discussion about our Design Thinking experience: I’ve been a participant at a coaching workshop led by Julia. Julia will also discuss other project experiences from workshops held in China.

If you can’t make it on Wednesday, all is not lost, because 3 of them will be repeated on Thursday, at different times (see timetable above). So you have another chance to chime in and ask questions about this non-technical but very valuable topic!

Last but not least…

If you’re interested in all things DT-related, you will certainly be pleased to know that there will be an additional evening event on Wednesday, hosted by the inimitable Marilyn Pratt. It’s called Failfaire. One of the mantras of Design Thinking (and not only of Design Thinking) is: ‘fail early and fail often’. But how do you learn from failure, converting your failures into success? That’s what this event is all about! Details are to be disclosed by Marilyn herself (or read her introductory blog on the subject), but make sure you sign up once registration opens, because something tells me this event will be sold out very quickly!

What did I miss?

As far as I know, I’ve compiled a fairly complete list here, but of course I don’t know everything that’s happening at sapteched_amsterdam, so if you have more information about Design Thinking related content, please leave a comment, and I’ll be happy to add it to this blog post!

With that, I hope to see everyone in Amsterdam in about a month, and I’m looking forward to fruitful discussions and connecting with other DT-aficionados!