Elearning - June/July 2008 - (Page 34) Into Another World ONLINE COURSES TEACH HOW TO MANAGE PROJECTS IN A VIRTUAL WORLD. B Y L I N D A G A L L O WAY The world’s largest business software company and the third-largest software supplier overall, SAP AG has a history of innovation and growth that has made it a leader in providing collaborative business solutions for all types of industries in every major market. Therefore, it’s not surprising that when SAP needed to improve the effectiveness of its project teams — most of which are culturally diverse and virtual — it developed a unique series of online courses covering all aspects of project management, and all based on an imaginary virtual world. For its efforts, SAP received Bersin & Associates’ 2007 Learning Leader award for Operational Program Excellence. This program, based on detailed criteria compiled 34 June/July 2008 Elearning! over years of research, recognizes organizations with effective and efficient learning approaches that have resulted in significant business improvement. SAP’s best practices in its enterprise-wide learning initiative provide valuable lessons for any learning organization seeking to align itself with corporate strategy. GLOBAL CHALLENGES With a global reach that includes nearly 44,000 employees serving more than 43,400 customers worldwide, SAP’s software development is spread among seven offices in six countries. Project managers often have team members in many of these locations. Several years ago, SAP realized that while most managers understood the basics of project and people management, they were having difficulty working with distributed teams because of cultural differences, communication barriers and multiple time zones. A further analysis showed that a many managers were unaware that manag- ing a remote team would require a different way of doing things. After experiencing numerous software development problems, SAP set out to increase the quality of its software development without increasing costs. It recognized that improving the management of its virtual teams was critical. By helping employees work together more efficiently and communicate more effectively, product quality and employee morale would improve and retention rates would increase. “To deal with this difficult and now common problem of virtual collaboration and communication among global project teams, we determined that the best solution would be to develop our own e-learning curriculum on how to manage virtual teams,” says Nanci McGonigal, a member of SAP Business One’s Global Training Development Department. “Since it was introduced, the program has withstood the test of time without any modifications. In fact, it has been so successful that it has been rolled out to all managers and is
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.