CoVid19 is a human as well as an economic disaster – yes, agreed. The consequences are not yet foreseeable – right. And I feel deep sympathy for all those who lost their loved ones in the course of this pandemic.

But honestly, I still can’t hear it right now. Especially with the implications here in social media. Every management consultancy, every accountant, every tax consultant, and whoever else now has clever tips on how to get through the crisis, how best to behave in the home office in order to still be able to work efficiently.

Already 14 days ago on linkedIn, for example, an entrepreneur got upset about this via video hack and asked to stop this consultant chatter and to make everyone believe that all work can be done equally good online. At the same time, he has issued slogans of perseverance and called for solidarity.                      

Basically, the latter is not wrong, but at the time I honestly smiled about it and thought to myself: “Another one who is spinning in the horizon of a hierarchical world and is now wondering why the ordered digital collaboration of his managerial staff banished to the home office is not working”. Today, with a slightly different perspective, I can understand him better again. At least when I take a look at the blogs and see all the clever tips that are being circulated there.

Well, consultants and trainers are now mostly sitting in their home office and have plenty of time to think up all these tips.
After all, most of their projects have been put into hibernation – and in spring.
At least organizational developments such as SAP S/4 HANA or complex product developments can apparently not be handled in a fully digitalized way.

Doesn’t work? Goes well! Mature solutions for remote collaboration and thus for the current problem of collaboration during the crisis have been available for a long time – but apparently not in the consciousness of those responsible and affected!
It’s just not enough to start thinking about it during the crisis. And sitting neatly dressed in your home office, waiting for tasks to be delivered by email and skyping from time to time is not really a solution for the current challenges.

Our largest business transformation with S/4 HANA rollout at an automotive supplier with over 60,000 employees simply continues in completely virtual teamwork. Our program, with currently around 170 team members scattered around the world, was already geared towards fully digitalized collaboration with agile methods and a Jira collaboration platform trimmed to KanBan. So we didn’t lack much for completely decentralized collaboration from the home office anyway.
Virtual integration and user acceptance tests, online SAP training before Golive and also cutover planning and execution all function in virtual teamwork.

We are currently preparing the next rollout wave and mobilizing the project management teams in EMEA, Americas, China and ASEAN in our virtual seminar center.
Alignment in the plenum with up to 60 participants alternates in our workshop sprints with intensive work in small teams. Switching on the video camera is mandatory – if the bandwidth allows it.
We use Conceptboard as a virtual work board and work simultaneously on a common canvas. All of our work in the program is managed on Jira cards, where we work together on solutions instead of searching for information in countless emails.

However, it is not enough just to provide the appropriate tools. If you are interested in what you need to know in order to work together in a decentralized way, please watch the following video. It’s a clip from a Meetup keynote long before the Corona Crisis that explains what’s really important in virtualizing collaboration.