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PeterSpielvogel
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

September 24, 2014 update

We have filled all the available openings for ramp-up customers.

Thank you for your overwhelming interest in SAP Screen Personas.

If you want to try the product before it becomes generally available, there will be opportunities at TechEd.

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Original post:

By now, you have probably heard that SAP Screen Personas 3.0 has entered ramp-up.

Just to set your expectations - this is a nomination and selection process. We need to choose a specific set of customers that meet certain industry / line of business / use case / language criteria. This will ensure that the ramp-up process thoroughly exercises the product and ensures that we can be very confident of its quality, performance and scalability when we make SAP Screen Personas 3.0 generally available.

What we are looking for from ramp-up customers

  1. Project scope aimed at going live with SAP Screen Personas within 3-4 months
  2. Budget to hire ramp-up coach for around 8 hours per week to assist with your project
  3. Willingness to collaborate closely during ramp-up process

Attention SAP Partners

Please apply through the partner portal if you want to use SAP Screen Personas for training and testing purposes.

You need to have a Test & Demonstration license.

To request a Ramp-Up partner shipment fill out this nomination form or go to Active Ramp-Up: Sap Screen Personas 3.0 on the SAP Partner Edge website.

Only in the following two cases you have to apply for ramp-up by using the online scoping document: (All slots are full as of September 24, 2014; please do not apply.)

  1. You are planning to implement Personas in Ramp-Up for your own productive use
    Contact your Ramp-Up Owners
  2. You are planning to implement Personas in Ramp-Up at customer
    Contact your Ramp-Up Owners

Technical requirements

  • Unicode
  • NetWeaver 7.40 SP3 BASIS or later
  • Kernel 7.40 (which will promptly be updated to 7.42 at start of the ramp-up process)
  • Ability to update the environment (Personas add-on and kernel) as needed during the ramp-up period. We expect this will be approximately every two weeks.
  • Highly skilled resources that can work with SAP to troubleshoot any issues

How to apply for ramp-up

To apply for ramp-up, you will need to go through your SAP account executive (please do not try to bypass this process by contacting the product team), who will send you a questionnaire. It contains the questions below. We have created this table to provide a bit more context about why we are asking these questions.

Once we receive the completed applications from customers, we will go through them and select those that will be best suited to help us meet our ramp-up goals. The main goal is to have you go live with SAP Screen Personas 3.0. So, we will be looking for motivated customers with a well-defined use case and technically competent people who can help us troubleshoot any issues that arise.

Question in ramp-up package

Why this is important

Have you identified all the important roles for a successful SAP Screen Personas project?

  • Executive sponsor
  • Business process expert
  • People familiar with SAP transactions that will be modified
  • Person with design skills
  • Person willing to learn SAP Screen Personas 3.0
  • Basis person to install and configure SAP Screen Personas add-on, update kernel as needed, address security issues

SAP Screen Personas requires several key roles to ensure that the overall project will be successful. We want to make sure that you have identified these individuals, and gained their commitment to contribute to the ramp-up effort. People can serve in more than one role, so you do not necessarily need a large team. For example, your business process expert may also be the SAP expert.

Can you ensure that the personnel responsible for these areas will be readily available to assist during ramp-up?

To keep the project moving and increase the probability of success (creating more usable screens), it is critical that the right people are available to perform their roles.

List the use cases you would like to target during the SAP Screen Personas 3.0 ramp-up (Please consider a maximum of three use cases for ramp-up).

Having the right scope (not too big, not too small) will make the project successful. For ramp-up, we are looking for a variety of use cases to exercise the product through many scenarios and transaction codes.

Which SAP transaction codes are associated with these use cases?

Again, ensuring diversity during the ramp-up period.

What is the approximate number of users targeted for these ramp-up use cases?

We want to make sure the use cases are meaningful and you have a path towards productive use.

Which metrics do you have in place to measure the success of the project?

There are several ways to measure success of your project to improve usability. For example:

  • Time to complete transactions
  • Number of keystrokes or clicks
  • User satisfaction
  • Training time reduction
  • Error rate per transaction
  • Others that are meaningful to you

We want to be sure that you have some tracking in place. Otherwise, how will you measure success?

Please provide reference data #of clicks, #of input fields interacted with, #of search helps used (please include screenshots with details)

Related to the above, this is setting the “before” benchmark for your business process. Taking these measurements means we can compare after deploying SAP Screen Personas to ensure you meet your goals.

Please provide end-to-end process time measured in SAP GUI for HTML (average of 10 measurements is sufficient)

Sometimes performance varies by user, time of day, type of data, and many other factors. We want a baseline measurement. Since SAP Screen Personas 3.0 is part of the Web GUI, it makes sense to use this as the benchmark for comparing before and after process time.

If this is an existing process in you company please provide training time and if existing training material.

Reducing training time and costs is one of the key value drivers of SAP Screen Personas. If you are spending money training people how to use SAP as part of a business process, we want to know what you are spending now so we can measure the reduction.

Do you have an SAP systems with 7.40 basis and 7.40 kernel on a separate application server to use during the SAP Screen Personas ramp-up?

SAP Screen Personas 3.0 during ramp-up requires a system with a 740 basis.

The first step will be to update the kernel to 7.42. We expect that other kernel changes will occur during ramp-up as needed as we address customer feedback.

Installing SAP Screen Personas on a separate application server will minimize disruption to your existing SAP environment.

Do you have the necessary know-how in-house to properly install, configure and administer the SAP Screen Personas add-on and configure the ITS?

The ramp-up process is a collaboration, in which we will work closely with you to ensure the product meets your needs. But, we have limited resources. So we need customers that have solid SAP knowledge and can perform basic installation, configuration, and update steps on their own (following our documentation).

Can you provide remote connection to SAP if we need to provide support during ramp-up?

At some point during the ramp-up period, you will probably identify some issues in which you need our assistance. Many customer environments are unique, so we might not be able to replicate your issue on our servers. So, we will need access to your systems to identify and remedy any problems so you can continue to move forward with the ramp-up process.

Do you already have an established theme concept, available branding elements, colors and other resources available to be used during ramp-up (and beyond)?

While SAP Screen Personas is a productivity tool, many customers use the opportunity to make their screens more attractive as well as more usable. Rather than make changes later to comply with your corporate branding standards, it would be best to have those requirements up front, so the screens you build during ramp-up can go straight into production once you pass your functional and performance requirements.

Are you available for phone calls between 7am and 6pm Pacific time to provide additional information for this nomination or help with the resolution of issues during rampup? Please provide details on availability.

As mentioned earlier, ramp-up will be a collaborative process. If we need to talk by phone, we want it to be during our standard business hours - and yours - so we can access your systems and technical experts as needed.

Assuming all goes well, are you willing to discuss your SAP Screen Personas 3.0 success in public?

We are looking for customers willing to tell their user experience transformation stories at TechEd, SAPPHIRE NOW, ASUG webcast, or in the form of a written document. We will give preference to customers that are willing to be references in the future.

Next Steps

Read more about what is new in SAP Screen Personas 3.0.

Contact your SAP account executive to start the SAP Screen Personas 3.0 ramp-up application process. (Full as of September 24, 2014)

Check back on SCN for tutorials about how to use SAP Screen Personas 3.0.

For the SAP Screen Personas product team, peter.spielvogel.

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