Good bye California, I'll miss you !!

 -- sorry, this time in english...I admit that this one is a reuse of an SAP internal blogpost --

I joined the Special Projects team in March 2013. At that time we were sitting away from the main SAP campus in Los Altos, working in the original AppHaus. It was an inspiring office, so different from any of SAP's other offices. The feeling was like a startup: rough, energetic, focused and motivated. If you've seen the movie Social Network, about Facebook's early days, you have some idea how it felt.

Our team included colleagues from everywhere: Germany and the US, of course, but also Switzerland, China, Australia and England. Team direction and project priorities changed almost daily, but we took these changes on as they came at us… and had a lot of fun doing it. A lot of what made it so much fun was being able to see results quickly. We didn't have to follow a rigorous and lengthy development, test and validation cycle. Instead, we worked in fast, tight iterations, asking for feedback as we went, and quickly delivered something for Vishal's DKOM Keynote in San Jose. We drove our project through Legal, One Voice, and Marketing, created a deployment tool for HANA XS engine applications, and were even able to offer a 14-day trial version of our DSHELL.

So what’s next? How do you build on this? How does it evolve, mature and spread? We are now engaged in creating an even broader platform for tool-agnostic development, and we have also filed a patent on our work. Again, the collaboration, the speed and energy with which things get done in Palo Alto is amazing! Just one call and, in less than an hour, we got a running Amazon instance. We collaborated very straight forwardly through documents stored in the cloud on Google Docs. There was no restrictive approach to adhere to; it was all about getting things done.

In June we moved to Building 8 in the newly renovated Dear Creek campus. The three buildings in this part of the Palo Alto facilities follow the AppHaus model of teams working in open, unwalled spaces. They incorporate much of what has been learned from teams in other buildings. And actually, it’s great! I liked it from the very beginning, when we had just a table and a chair. Within a couple of days we made this space our space. We designed it, moved furniture, hung pictures and placed plants. I really like the open space, and its unfinished incompleteness. This environment, enables and supports the active communication and collaboration essential to fast, effective work. Also, I have never written so much on white boards and walls (nearly all surfaces are covered with special paint that lets you use dry-erase markers everywhere). It took a while to get used to doing this as it brought up deep childhood memories of such behavior being strictly forbidden; here, now, its encouraged.

Most recently there was a huge change in team direction as our team joined the COO organization. We have taken on the challenge of reinventing SAP's development culture, methods and tools. We started by having a 2-day workshop in Walldorf, and conducting over 40 interviews with colleagues in various roles and from various locations. From these we will begin to understand the main pain points of the current development processes.

So, again, we are doing something quite different from what we were doing the month before. This sudden change was stressful, but it was also a lot of fun. Everybody in the team was working together, moving in the same direction. Problems? Not really. Instead we thought of challenges and opportunities, and our discussions were always very fruitful. As a team we had, and still have, the feeling that we can do something truly significant for SAP, and that motivates all of us. Whether designers making new tools desirable, developers assessing their feasibility, or me considering their viability, we all feel our work is important.

During the first couple of weeks I was in Palo Alto I found myself quickly changing, adapting to the typical Silicon Valley way of approaching problems, taking on new challenges. One thing that became more and more clear to me is that we have a unique opportunity at SAP to combine two special worlds. If we are able to meld German engineering with Silicon Valley openness we can create amazing new things. If there is the willingness to take risks and even fail, but to learn and grow from those failures, we will become the undisputed world leader in business software. We as a company have all that we need: a proven, rock-solid ERP backend, new and desirable mobile front end applications, and a significant presence in The Cloud.

I am excited to take on this challenge to bring the best of these two worlds together. I am very glad to be part of the newly-formed COO organization.

Last but not least, there was the personal experience of living in a foreign country. Silicon Valley is unique in the world. Dispite the hi-tech frenzy, it is actually a very nice place. The climate is superb: we haven’t had a single rainy day in the 6 month I have been here, and its never too hot or too humid, but always comfortable. Almost every weekend I got out and explored Northern California, from Big Sur in the south, to Point Reyes in the north, to Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada, east of the Central Valley. The Silicon Valley is surrounded by an epic natural environment, and, at the same time sits just an hour drive south of one of the greatest cities in the world, San Francisio, known to locals simply as The City.

Best regards,
Joerg