Detrás de escena: Cómo creamos el curso 'Desarrollo y Extensión de Aplicaciones SAP Fiori Elements'

I’m excited that our new openSAP course “Developing and Extending SAP Fiori Elements Apps” is launching in June 2021. It has been a long journey to bring this course to you, with a large, diverse, global team working on many tasks, often in parallel. While many of you are familiar with the structure and flow of openSAP courses, you may not know everything that happens behind the scenes to bring one of these offerings to you.

In this blog post, I will share the inside view of how we create an openSAP course. I hope this helps you appreciate all the work that goes into it and gives you insights into some of the fun and frustrations we encountered while creating the SAP Fiori elements course. I’ll focus on several areas that I feel are most important:

• Teamwork – there are many different groups that collaborate to create the content. I’ll touch on some of the key roles that enable us to complete the course development and package into the familiar openSAP format


• Timing – how long it really takes to complete all the different tasks


• Outtakes – I’ll share some funny anecdotes (imagine the outtakes in a DVD) about where we ran into problems, and how we can laugh about them today

Teamwork

While you see the presenters in any openSAP course, there are many more people that are critical to make the course possible. I’ll cover each of the major roles.

Presenters – These people put their personal and professional reputations on the line by appearing in online videos. And they become instantly recognizable at SAP TechEd, SAPPHIRE, and other SAP events because people have seen them in openSAP courses and think they know them. I guess “openSAP famous” is a subset of Internet famous. Behind each presenter are...

Video experts – Back in pre-Covid times, we recorded our openSAP units in one of the professionally-equipped studios on one of the SAP campuses. This ensured that everyone’s video had high-quality and uniform framing, lighting, and sound. For the past year, that has changed.

We now use whatever recording equipment we have at home, usually a phone or iPad for the video and laptop for the slides and demos. With everyone using different cameras, microphones, and room acoustics, it takes a great deal of skill to edit all the videos to create a consistent experience across all units. We appreciate the hard work and dedication of the people who merge multiple videos into a seamless unit and remove unwanted dogs barking, trucks passing by, and birds chirping.

Content experts – In addition to showing the presenters on the course website, you also find the content experts on the page too. These people provide expertise on the underlying products or processes highlighted in the curriculum. In this course, there are also a few more people who contributed, but did not want to appear on the web site. We’ll keep them anonymous here too, to respect their desire for privacy.

Project management – To keep all the different elements of the course moving forward and track the progress, we had great project management. Colleagues from the SAP UX team (Marcus) and the openSAP team (Michael and Ruxandra) worked together to schedule meetings, track progress in various Excel worksheets, maintain the SharePoint site, handle logistics, coordinate resources and review cycles, and answer questions from all the colleagues. Without them, we would have a bunch of nice slide decks, but not a cohesive finished product.

Quality control – Every word and image that appear on a slide is reviewed by an expert on the openSAP team. They check all the assessment questions for clarity so there is no confusion about what the correct answer is. They also cross-check the questions with the videos to ensure that quizzes and exams only ask about content that is included in either a slide or the talk track. This helps avoid complaints from the students if they feel their answer is the right answer rather than the one in the answer key.

IT infrastructure – If you are doing exercises in a hands-on course such as ours, you are probably using some SAP system. It could be a trial account on SAP Business Technology Platform to access SAP Business Application Studio. It might be the back-end SAP S/4HANA system that contains the data that will power the apps you build. In any case, there are experts that maintain the systems and infrastructure that you use in the course, likely without even thinking about it. A course in which you develop and extend SAP Fiori elements apps would not be possible without their expertise and attention to detail.

Content owners - each openSAP course has one or more content owners. They are ultimately responsible for everything that appears in the course. I had this responsibility for the development week of “SAP Fiori Overview: Design, Develop and Deploy” course, so I had a sense of what was involved. For this course, I partnered with stefanie.runde for the first three weeks on SAP Fiori elements and SAP Fiori tools. oliver.graeff was the lead for the final week on SAPUI5 flexibility.

This consumed around half of each work week for the first few months of the year. In addition to creating content for our own units, we helped our colleagues with the story line, presentation slides, demos, and assessment questions. Stefanie and I met daily for between one and three hours for around 10 weeks. There was always something to create, review, or debate.

Weekly meetings, combined with email, Slack, and Teams communication kept everyone coordinated and allowed us to make good use of our geographic separation. It was common to hand off work at the end of