UK Personas Training Day – event report

Over the last few years I’ve spoken at numerous conferences and other events about SAP Screen Personas and our use of it here at the University of Warwick. At the start of all of these talks I always ask for a show of hands to see who has used, or even seen, Personas before. Most of the time, a large proportion of the audience has little or no knowledge of Personas and its capabilities. And most of the time those same people leave thinking this is a tool that could be useful and that they need to learn more about, and wondering why they’ve not heard about it before. Personas seems to be a well kept secret!

To try and fix that I’ve been wanting for a while to organise a “Personas Day”, to give people the opportunity to learn much more about the product, and especially to get some hands-on experience of it. In my opinion Personas is best experienced by actually using it, and realising how quickly you can start building useful things with it. Thanks to the generosity of Peter Spielvogel and Tobias Queck, this finally happened on Tuesday of this week. Peter and Tobias took time out from a trip to the UK to come here to Warwick to support a UKISUG User Experience Special Interest Group (UX SIG) meeting, and the following day to run a full day of hands-on Personas training. Think TechED hands-on, but running all day. We had a room of 40 people, a good mixture of people who’d used Personas 3 already, used Personas 2 before but not 3, and some who’d never touched Personas at all, all learning everything from basic screen editing to advanced scripting and using the newest Personas 3 SP03 features to turn SAPgui screens into Fiori-like screens.

Some people, non-techies especially, found the advanced content a little tough, but all left understanding much more about what Personas can do, and with ideas for how to use it when they get back to the office. Some were determined to get it installed in their landscape and to continue learning.

A few comments:

“Just a quick note to say thank you for holding the Personas workshop day, yesterday – I’m quite new to SAP, but can see how new users to SAP would benefit from using Personas (as an ‘ease-in’ to SAP and especially where they are occasional users of the system. So, very helpful and a lot covered on the course.”

“A very good day.  I can see all sorts of potential for it, especially now we understand where Personas fits with Fiori and other options.”

“Just wanted to thank you for all the hard work you put in to make the last couple of days such a success. I for one really appreciated the opportunity to kick start my Personas journey!”

“Thanks for having us today – enjoyed it, even if my brain did start frying towards the end”

I had an upper limit of 40 people in the training room, and had a waiting list of more than 10 people, so I’m going to have to look at organising a repeat event!

Thanks once again to Peter and Tobias for taking time out to support this, and to Holly Evans from the team here at Warwick for supporting me in organising the event.