August 13, 2014 update
SAP Screen Personas 3.0 is now in ramp-up.
Original post
There has been a huge amount of interest in SAP Screen Personas, especially since the licensing changed in June 2014. While hundreds of customers felt the product was worth paying for, we have seen thousands of download since SAPPHIRE NOW. I suspect many of these people are now thinking about how to choose between whether to deploy SAP Screen Personas 2.0 now or wait until SAP Screen Personas 3.0 is available.
If you fall into this category, only you can make the decision about what is right for your organization. But, I will provide some guidance that I hope will help you choose whether to start now or wait.
Before making a technology decision, you need to:
- Understand the needs of the PEOPLE that will use simplified SAP screens
- Know their BUSINESS needs and what information is critical and what can be safely ignored
- Follow user-centric PROCESSES, such as design thinking, to identify and prioritize where to start
Preliminary conversations about SAP usability generally start with a discussion about business goals. Then, the focus shifts to the end user, aiming to address their specific needs for improved productivity and simplicity in their day-to-day roles. Some people follow the SAP Screen Personas getting started checklist to ensure that all the pieces are in place for a successful project.
Start with SAP Screen Personas 2.0 or wait for version 3.0? It depends on your go-live urgency.
Most likely, your decision will end up based on one key question: When do you want to roll out simplified screens to your employees?
If the answer is sooner rather than later, then immediately download Personas 2.0 and get to work. We have had several customers start and finish their projects with around six weeks. The finish line, of course, is having employees use simplified screens to complete their jobs. Freescale spoke at SAPPHIRE NOW about they rolled out streamlined HR transactions using SAP Screen Personas in less than six weeks.
The characteristics of customers that go live quickly with SAP Screen Personas are:
- Narrow and well-defined use case
- Dedicated and highly skilled staffing
- Compelling business need that creates sense of urgency to complete project quickly
- Continuous improvement mindset - willing to iterate until it’s right
If you are not in as much of a rush, then I still encourage you to start the process now. For many customers, it takes time to define the business scenario, conduct the user research, analyze the scenario, determine design themes, build design themes, create prototypes of screens, all before even touching the SAP Screen Personas software. By following a design thinking methodology, you obtain feedback early and often to ensure alignment with the business objectives, increasing the probability of success in your screen simplification project.
Once you understand and have analyzed all the issues, then you can start designing screens (starting with wire frames on a white board) and then building them in SAP Screen Personas. At that point, when you are ready to start building screens using SAP Screen Personas, then see what version of the software is available. This process will allow you to progress on your overall project, while deferring your decision on what version of SAP Screen Personas to use.
Or, you and your organization may make a strategic decision to wait for SAP Screen Personas 3.0. This option makes sense is you want to:
- Eliminate duplication of effort in training people on two very different versions of SAP Screen Personas
- Reduce the risk of migrating you flavors from SAP Screen Personas 2.0 to SAP Screen Personas 3.0
- Include advanced scripting in your flavors, which we plan to make easier in SAP Screen Personas 3.0
- Avoid Silverlight entirely in the context of SAP Screen Personas
We wish you success with your SAP Screen Personas project, whichever version you select.
For the SAP Screen Personas product team, peter.spielvogel.
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