QA with Carsten Burghardt, CEC Cloud Services Support, SAP Hybris Viewpoint careers advice blog

QA with Carsten Burghardt, CEC Cloud Services Support, SAP Hybris Carsten Burghardt, SAP Hybris Carsten Burghardt is well versed on the subject of digitalisation.   As Head of Strategic Programs Projects, CEC Cloud Services Support at SAP Hybris he has seen firsthand how organisations, particularly with regard to ecommerce, are having to adapt to the increasing demands of their digital savvy customers. And as a former IT contractor himself, he is well placed to assess how far contractors and the wider flexible workforce are becoming the ‘engine room’ of digitalisation. I sat down with him recently to get his own take on the digitalisation mega trend. Can you please give me an overview of your career to date? I originally started out as a Programmer after studying Computer Science at university, but I realised pretty early on that it wasn’t going to be for me. I found that I enjoyed the ‘business’ side of projects more and so I made the move to consulting â€" acting as a bridge between technical and non-technical teams. Later I moved to IT Project Management (at Logica, now CGI) before deciding to go it alone as a contractor. I enjoyed working on complex projects and helping to solve my clients’ problems, as well as still utilising my technical background. After eight years I was hired by Hybris who needed a Project Manager to help them with their post-merger integration after being acquired by SAP. I was originally hired by a guy I went to university with, which shows you the importance of maintaining your network as an IT contractor. This turned out to be my last client as a contractor as I eventually became a permanent employee of the newly formed SAP Hybris, setting up my own Project Management office to deliver large strategic projects within Cloud Services Support. What are the responsibilities of your current job role? On the one side, I provide support to my team of Project Managers and help them if they need assistance from other parts of the business. I also assign them new initiatives that have been identified as strategic. I am responsible for quality control in terms of processes and standards and ensure deliverables are met on time. I am also an escalation point for any issues that might occur during a project. On the other side, I am the Programme Manager for one of the larger initiatives we have at SAP Hybris, which is a cloud migration project with a number of stakeholders, including external technology providers and contractors. How does SAP Hybris help its clients with digitalisation/digital transformation projects and what role does your team play in this? Primarily SAP Hybris helps its clients through the implementation of our core customer engagement and commerce solutions. Our clients are faced with a lot of digital challenges. Their customers (both B2B and B2C) have growing demands and expectations when it comes to ecommerce functionality and integration across channels. The strength of SAP Hybris is that we can address all of our clients’ channels. Can you tell me about one or two client projects that have been particularly large scale and challenging to work on? Part of SAP’s strategy is to utilise our own database, HANA, through all of our cloud projects going forward. This will create a uniformed technology stack across all cloud solutions, which will make integrations and development much easier in future. HANA is also a complete analytics solution that is optimised for Big Data, which brings numerous decision-making benefits to an organisation. We are currently in the process of migrating all of our clients that are already in the cloud on to HANA. As you can imagine, this is a very large scale project, especially when you consider our client base is growing fifty percent plus every year. The project started last year and is set for completion in 2018. What are the main issues you find your clients face when trying to deliver their digitalisation/digital transformation projects? There is an increasing expectation from consumers that the products and services they buy will be integrated across all of a brand’s touchpoints. For example, they expect that they will see the same offers instore as they will online or if they send an email to a customer service department the person that they talk to in the call centre will also have this same information to hand. To meet this expectation, our clients’ technology solutions are getting more complex. They don’t have all the specialists they need internally, so they have to rely on partners to help them, and the requirements for these partners is always increasing. Our clients are constantly challenged to keep up with the latest market developments, find the right partners to help them do this and make the right technology investments. Are you seeing a culture shift within your client organisations as a result of these digitalisation/digital transformation projects? Looking at it from my area of focus, a cloud migration is a culture shift as the client has to completely rely on a partner for the hosting and security of their data. This reflects the technology market more generally as organisations are working more and more with external partners, rather than trying to keep everything in-house as they did in the past. That’s a clear shift. What is the makeup of your team? Are they all based in one country, or internationally as well? My team is evenly split between Germany and Canada, with one colleague also based in the UK. Normally projects range across different regions and there is a necessity to work remotely. That being said, it is still important to talk to team members face-to-face from time to time and get to know them personally. Building these relationships helps to speed up the working process significantly. As my team are distributed across the main SAP Hybris hubs they are also able to help each other out across different time-zones, which is beneficial. This is a definite advantage of working in an international business like SAP Hybris. Do you ever hire IT contractors to help you to complete your projects? If so what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this? If I look at the HANA project I spoke about earlier, we have needed a large number of IT contractors as well as external partners to help us to deliver it. There are seventeen different migration teams involved and we obviously can’t resource all of these internally. I have purposely split the teams between contractors and our partners. The contractors work on site at SAP Hybris for the project which accelerates the work as they can speak to our internal teams directly. Our partners work from their own offices. The advantage of using IT contractors is the flexibility they give us, as they allow us to quickly react to changing conditions and project requirements. The disadvantages of using IT contractors is that you can lose their skills and knowledge after they leave the project. This makes a proper handover essential. It can also be difficult to find the right people at the right time and there is also a lot of competition from other companies for highly-skilled individuals. In the future do you think IT teams will hire more people on a permanent basis or will contract / project based work grow in popularity with employers and candidates? SAP Hybris will need both! On the one hand we are trying to grow our employee base in positions we know we will need on a permanent basis, while on the other, trying to hire more contractors in areas where we know demand will ramp up and down. Looking at our client organisations I can see there is a massive demand for contractors and technology partners. This is because technology is not their core competency but the technology demands of the business and its customers continue to grow rapidly. What do you think will be the future trends in digitalisation/digital transformation more generally? Systems continue to become better integrated and larger volumes of data can be analysed to give a more accurate prediction of customer behaviour. The type of projects I was working on at the start of my time with SAP Hybris were concentrated on individual business areas but this year I see a strong demand for projects with more complexity across different cloud products and involving more groups of stakeholders. Ultimately there is a cascading effect in ecommerce whereby one brand is able to utilise technology to deliver an improved service to customers who then in turn start to demand this as standard from all the brands they buy from. What do you think will be the future trends in your own specialist area? I think there will be stronger integrations across cloud products which will making collecting, analysing and sharing data easier. This is a ‘future’ trend but it is something that has already started and it is in high demand with our clients already. Please reach out to Carsten on LinkedIn if you would like to connect or discuss anything covered in this article. If you’re interested in job opportunities, get in touch with one of our local recruitment experts to find out more about Hays IT contracting services. Hopefully you found this blog interesting. 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