First, you do get options. Part of the job of the consultants is to give the customer the options that fit their needs best. If you have a good team, this can be done without any programming - we did it in Rohm and Haas. My first contact with SAP was as a “future end user”, later I moved to the “internal consultants team”. A bad team will use additional programming; often for things which SAP already does just by clicking the right button somewhere… but their help and too much of the training is about “what SAP can do” and not “how to do it”.
An example among many: we had factories that put through QC everything that reached the factory (including stuff for the offices, not just for production); others that only put some raw materials through QC; others that none. We gave them the right settings in each case.
A bad consultant (for SAP, for ISO9000, for six-sigma, for any management thing you wish to name) would have come up with a “one size fits all solution”. Several of the consultants that got “returned to sender” were guys who said everybody had to QC inspect everything… hell NO. Or rather, as one of my co-workers put it “hell, yes and let’s take it off that fucker’s salary!”
Or, conversely, would have prepared a one-size-fits all solution… and required additional programming for all the “special cases”. One of my post-RH assignments was in a place where the programmers were in the process of creating this program, from scratch, to get the system to call QC in “one of every ten receipts for a given material in a given place”. SAP already has that feature! The look in the lead programmer’s face was priceless. It was priceless when he realized they could have saved all that effort; it was priceless when he realized how much effort my knowledge had saved them; and it was priceless when he glared at the guy who’d been setting up things - our team leader, originally of Finance… and yet another guy who didn’t understand such concepts as “you’re the only one who has MSProject; the rest of us cannot update the calendars because we don’t have any means to open them”
I completey agree with this. A good consultant spends lots of time asking, listening and understanding. Not just “how are you doing your job now” but also “why do you do it that way? what does it gain the business?”
I was all set to come in here and call you a moron for doubting my elite 'puter skills just because I don’t know Windows Key combinations… but it turns out that you mean people who can’t use keyboard shortcuts at all.
Doesn’t everybody learn some of those shortcuts just because they’re faster? Even if I have to hit tab a half a dozen times it’s easier than moving my hand to the mouse.
And, also, doesn’t everyone learn how to do the whole “navigate a Windows box completely by keyboard, including using the damned right click key” because they have to finish typing up that paper at 3 am after spilling a martini onto their mouse, and no computer stores are open?
Nah. Wal-Mart sells mice, and they’re open 24 hours a day.
Regarding the OP, it seems that if those shortcuts are irrelevant to the consultant’s job, then I don’t see why he has to know them any more than he would have to know how layers work in Photoshop.
That’s really great, but who gives a shit if I’ve got a working mouse? Can you do your work 4 times as fast by knowing the shortcuts, or is it just dimestore nerd bragging rights?
When you can use vi as your primary editor, *then *you can brag about your keyboard wizardry. But unfortunately nobody will understand.
These shortcut skills are pretty basic and are fundamental to anyone that uses Windows a moderate amount. I am assuming these SAP consultants are developers too and should fit into that category. Knowing these types of shortcuts usually demonstrates a healthy curiousity and willingness to improve at one’s work. Sure, I wouldn’t use it as a litmus test for setting the bozo-bit, but efficient navigating is one criteria. A parallel is a carpenter not knowing the most efficient way to use a hammer.
Nope. A lot of things can be done many ways (not just in the computer world), but most people only learn the first way they were taught. Specially if that way was the buttons.
I’ve been teaching people how to use computers for some 20 years, which is specially funny because I didn’t own one until 10 years ago and most of the people I taught before that did own one. Imagine Word training. In my experience, if you teach people how to do things in historical order (first menu, then shortcut, then button), they usually remember all three. Not only that, but they are able to locate other stuff on the menus. If you teach the buttons first, all they remember is the buttons. In formal classes, there’s times I tell people “ok, no mouse for five minutes” or “no keyboard for five minutes”. It sounds silly as hell but most people end up being able to mix both modes of operation.
gazpacho, in the end, everybody has to enter data at some point. Even the general manager. (Your username makes me hungry, by the way, don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before)
People who are proficient with vi are entitled to brag–just as people who are proficient at cranking over the engine of their airplane, by hand, then leaping in before it taxis off without them are entitled to brag. I’d still rather go up against an opponent in an F-15 or F-18 than a Sopwith Camel or Fokker Dr-1. Ancient crappy software is crappy software even when it was birthed of necessity and any shop that is too cheap to buy a reasonable editor deserves to be shut down.
Oh, whatever, Mr.-I-Read-It-On-The-Wiki. My point was there is an infinite number of niggling ways you can smugly judge the superiority of your work habits, but when you get down to it, the only difference is how well it translates into significant value. Nobody gives a rat’s ass whether you know the windows shortcuts or what you use as your editor as long as you’re bringing value to the company. This is a stupid Pit thread.
Microsoft Office doesn’t run on broadband switches; it just happens that vi does. I guess that means any company that operates broadband switches should be shut down? It’s a matter of the right tool for the right job, chief; please don’t generalize the entire industry based on your own limited experience.
Also known as the Black Box Syndrome. The computer is a magical Black Box; all the user has to do is rub it and the answer gets barfed out immediately. Users like this are spawn of Satan.
Um… a broadband switch is not a desktop computer. It has no mouse, it has no graphics. It is not somewhere you sit down and bang out a letter to grandma. When come back, bring clue.
