Twan van den Broek

Marilyn Pratt organized the BPX Process Design Slam at SAP TechEd 2009 for the second time. There are some wiki pages dedicated to the event. What was the idea ? Marilyn welcoming us and explaining what BPX Process Slam is about Greg, who took his role as a major very seriously, explaining the process that needs to be modeled Twan telling about agile and the methodology to be used during the evening Marilyn introducing the business matter experts The goal was to work in 3 iterations of 30 minutes on four deliverables: Process design UI design Rules design Data model/enterprise services More on my SDN blog about the event.

Twitter is a great platform to follow event attendees, type in the hashtag in some Twitter app and you read all about the event. Try it this week with SAP TechEd Bangalore, use the hashtag #sapteched09. SAP did a great job integrating Twitter into the event. They were promoting to use it on beforehand. And during the event @sapteched kept us up to date. You just could not get by all the #sapteched09 tweets, SAP installed screensavers all over the place. @ttrapp You are a real #sapteched09 die hard. Still in a session and tweeting. I am at airport, good to have met with you. Thu Oct 29 17:33:38 +0000 2009 Closing my MacBook, feel exhausted. Need at least twice the time to process all the #sapteched09 material ;-) Thu Oct 29 16:09:49 +0000 2009 Thanks to @fotolouis I could complete our wiki for the #bpxslam09 http://bit.ly/1FOMAi #sapteched09. Thu Oct 29 16:05:30 +0000 2009 RT @jpenninkhof: Feeling a #sapteched09 after-dip coming up.. :S << Already in it, don't want to l

During SAP TechEd 2009 in Vienna I would like to organize an Agile SAP meetup . Let's sit together in the SDN Community Clubhouse with a nice cup of coffee and share thoughts on: Experiences with Agile approaches (Scrum, Smart, Lean, ...) in SAP projects Ideas on making projects more Agile Brainstorm on suggestions to transform ASAP to something more Agile Want to join? Meet us at the community clubhouse: - Thursday 29 October at 14:00.

It is SAP TechEd Season, every year it is the same story: how to select out of 256 session and build your personal agenda. While browsing through all the sessions I kept a small Top 10 of SAP TechEd topics (*): (1) SAP NetWeaver (88 sessions) (10) BusinessObjects (25) (6) ABAP (16) (5) BI (16) (4) BPM (15) (2) SOA (10) (9) Web Dynpro (9) (3) Java (8) (8) Composition Environment (6) (7) Enterprise Services (5) Between brackets the results from 2008 . So what can we learn ? Java dropped down to #8, ABAP raised to #3. Investments in ABAP paying off? Business Objects climbed to #2, with BI on #4 a lot of 'suit' sessions are entering the SAP TechEd schedule. BO and BI are not real 'geeks', they are suits playing with technology ;-) SOA is falling down to #6. The hype is over? BPM lost one place to BI. I would have thought that BPM would climb some places this year. Runner up topics: Xcelsius (3) and Sustainability (3) (*) Disclaimer: This Top 10 i

Some time ago Sander and I sat together to prepare our Agile SAP story for the SOA symposium conference. We still have to finalize, it will be a just in time delivery ;-) But hey - the main line is set: By the way we also appear in an expert (what about that ;-) panel discussion on Agile development and Service Orientation .

Last Friday we celebrated 12,5 years of CIBER NL. The band was formed by 10 colleagues. A good atmosphere and a good party!

With SAP TechEd season coming up, this is a great video to have a look behind the scenes from last years SAP TechEd. 4500 attendees, 1000 laptops, 3.5 kilometers of truss, 12000 square meters of carpet and 15000 sandwiches How about that ;-)

Last Thursday was my first webcast at SDN: Agile SAP, Mission Impossible ? The replay is, just as the other sessions, available on SDN . With a webcast it is a kind of difficult to interact with the people that are connected. Known pitfall is then to start talking faster and faster. I sure hope that the message got through. And for those who want to view the presentation again - it is available via SlideShare: On the last slide some interesting links to more information are available. During the session some questions arose in the chat window. Use cases instead of user stories : We thought that user stories are very well applicable to web environments. But in our situation we also had a lot of backend functionality and processes to be realized. Therefore we decided to model everything with use cases. Bigger size teams (>=100): Our team developed 1/3 of the total solution. The other teams did not work according to scrum. But if they did there is a scrum of scrums approach to share

Coming weeks are story telling weeks. Sander Hoogendoorn and I have our Agile SAP story on the agenda at the following events: September 24, 17:00 (GMT+1) 2009 Virtual Community Day An SDN webcast open to everyone who is interested. After my slides I hope to have an interesting discussion with fellow SDNers on this topic. This will be my first webcast, I will try to prevent any technical flaws ;-) Follow the Twitter updates to get the link where the session is broadcasted. October 22, 14:15 SOA Symposium, Rotterdam Sander and I will do the “ Agile SAP: Mission Impossible ” show together for the first time. Hope we have enough time for all our slides and stories ;-) October 27 – 29, SAP TechEd Vienna During the SAP TechEd in Vienna I hope to find a timeslot to organize a meet up with other agile enthusiastic participants. Maybe we can find each other in the community clubhouse and have a cappuccino together. November 25, 14:00 Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2009 (Dutch Architec

Wow, Agile SAP, Mission Impossible? made it to the frontpage of bpx.sap.com . Looks like more and more people are interested in making SAP agile ;-)

Just posted " Agile SAP: Mission Impossible? " on SDN: Applying Agile to the world of SAP projects, well that is an impossible mission. Right? Lots of die hard SAP people still believe so. Even so described by the ASAP project approach. I personally feel that this is going to change very soon, just as SAP projects are changing rapidly with all the possibilities that SAP NetWeaver as business process platform is offering. Read more on SDN . See what Agile can do to your team: Please share your experiences on Agile and the world of SAP as a reaction on this blog or on our Agile SAP twibes .

In my blog on doing the SAP Scrum I described that we wanted to follow the Scrum approach for the second phase of the project. In the first phase we lived according to the traditional waterfall method and experienced the traditional issues. Now we are three weeks on route and this week we started our first realization iteration , our first sprint. The past three weeks we focused on delivering the product backlog , the scope in deliverables so to say. Scope that is to be realized with SAP BPM, SAP XI, SAP CRM, ABAP and some minor (*) web development. Now I would like to share some experiences that we gathered over the past three weeks. (*) Main focus is to realize backend components for an administrative process. The traditional process of writing all relevant documentation first is taking too much time. Writing business requirements – evaluate. Writing functional specifications – evaluate. Writing technical specifications – evaluate. Realize / Build. Test, if there is still time lef

Oscar Mulders, a colleague, posted an article in Computable , a Dutch IT magazine. "Customers do not ask for SOA, they long for the expected business advantages" "Service orientation combined with BPM means shortening the throughput time and less effort required" You can read the whole article at the Computable site (In Dutch).

After my last post on doing the SAP Scrum at my current project an interesting discussion evolved on Twitter : Well I am a bit flattered that @yojibee thought that I was an SAP employee ;-) With " Doing the SAP Scrum " I was only looking for a catching title.

Today I finally finished my blog on the SAP Scrum. We started the second phase of the project by doing things differently, not the traditional waterfall but doing a Scrum . In this blog you can read about some thoughts that kept me awake: Why is it so hard to deal with changing requirements? Why is time pressure in a project forwarded to teams that are last in line, like developers and testers? Read more in SAP Scrum: An agile approach to deliver what is really required .

On January 13th we gathered for our TopForce Knowledge Night: SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 EHP1 install party . Goal was to get the CE installed and running on the participants (16) laptops. After installation we planned to build the demo scenario as described in my SDN blog Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM . Quite a full program, and we almost made it to the end. As we had to leave the office at 21:30 sharp we ran out of time and could not deploy and test run the application. Despite that we had a great evening with a lot of fun, strange issues (with 16 laptops you can get 16 different error messages) and new SAP NetWeaver BPM enthusiasts . Temperature is rising, will it work or not? See Tim looking really seriously to his process composer "Great stuff". Conclusions of the evening: Without the install manual it is very hard, installing CE is not plug and play Installing the downloaded SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio is even more complicated. Lucky for

It took some time to get the movie recorded and uploaded to the internet. Finally my demo scenario of the last two posts is visible available in a tutorial movie on BPM/BRM. I hope it will help you explore things in the new SAP NetWeaver BPM world, despite the fuzziness of the movie. I have added it to the SDN blog, Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM / the BRM sequel .

Pff, thanks to Arti from SAP Product Management BRM I found out that my BRM troubles were caused by my download release of SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1. I was using: Build id: 200809132152, downloaded in October 2008. After a fresh download and a complete re-install of CE, I am now using Build id: 200811082206. Installation of both CE and the IDE is still nog plug and play. But fortunately a very well written manual is delivered with the download: Install&Configure_CE_Preview71EHP1-Dec2008.pdf. When you experience an error during the CE installation, just click 'Retry' somewhere around step 20. And do that again when the same error pops up. That did the trick during my installation. I started the installation at 11:06 and it was finished at 12:42, including starting up the CE environment. A new record , 1,5 hour! The new installation resolved my BRM issues and you can read more about this in my SDN blog: Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM / the BRM sequel .

During SAP TechEd08 I really got enthusiastic on SAP NetWeaver BPM , formerly known as Galaxy and in 2008 again branded as Galaxy. Especially the integration of the Business Rules engine made me want to try this at home. Personally I feel that BRM is not optional within BPM, it is not a feature, it belongs to the total concept of process orchestration. Without it, BPM is not complete. So I built a BPM demo for the TopForce Learning Day. A recap of this demo can be found in my SDN blog Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM . A simple process but effective enough to show the power of the concept. I updated this process to implement BRM: Now I want to implement a business rule with BRM. But unfortunately I can’t get this to work. What I want to do is extend the process with a mapping step in which the rule get called. Within this rule the expense amount gets checked: Under €25 the expense gets validated automatically and above that the manager needs to approve or reject. In