Tag Archives: feedback

Girl hiding behind tree

Permission to be seen (or not).

Hello! Time for me to go on a bit of rant again. So far, these little rants have been very successful! With support from the community (and demonstrating this to the SAP SuccessFactors leadership group), we’ve pushed the dial a few times in the right direction (well, I thought it was the right direction anyway!) Although, I’m perhaps not as optimistic about this one… let’s see!

The “Reimagined” Home Page (a naming that is going to get tired very quickly!)

A little while ago (quite some time actually – end of 2020) SAP announced that it was going to retire the existing Fiori Launchpad style homepage and move to a new “reimagined” home page. The reimagined home page had been demo’d during a few SuccessFactors conferences and looked quite exciting. The new home page is pretty cool. The whole concept of having the things that are important to you right now highlighted and brought to the front is a good one. Show me what I need to act on right now! Make me do it quickly!

Image from SAP Help – https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/2011/en-US/e13ea0e595b148edbb44f424f1a00b7c.html

This said – it seems that it’s still a bit of a journey to parity with the old home page. (which may never happen, given the different idea that we’re working with – some things just wouldn’t make sense in a one-to-one mapping.) However, relatively important pieces of functionality, like to-do notifications, manager team tiles and ability to use with onboardees is still being added. There’s also the minor/major issue that you can’t do a refresh to or from any system that has the reimagined home page implemented using the instance refresh tool, you have to request SAP to do it. The plan is that by end of 2H2021 release, everything that is needed to go live with the new home page will be added and these issues fixed. (And hopefully we’ll be able to have that text in the middle of the top panel in some colour other than white).

The (forced) migration to the reimagined home page

There was a plan to push all customers to the new home page by 2H2021. (I just can’t manage to keep typing reimagined… it’s so going to get renamed to “Home Page” as soon as it’s the only option. Can I chalk up another product renaming before it even happens?) But then due to some functionality not going to be available until then, there was this strange idea to push the release universally to all customer’s preview instances 2H2021 and then production 1H2022.

So, I had a bit of a rant about how it really didn’t make sense to push the new home page to all customers’ preview instance before all of the fixes were rolled out and customers had some time to test them. (It wasn’t just me that had this rant – lots of community support for that idea). SAP have now pushed back that idea, we should instead get the universal push in 1H2022 for all customers. So, you’d better get ready for it! Cos it’s coming!

Okay…  so what’s the problem?

Well, see the thing is, the main reason that we need the new home page experience, is also the main reason why the existing experience is so useful.

Image again from SAP SuccessFactors What’s New Viewer – https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/2011/en-US/e13ea0e595b148edbb44f424f1a00b7c.html

Note how there’s a lot of content on the old layout compared to the new one… well that screen shot is pretty minimalistic compared to some customer instances I’ve come across. (And, I’ll admit, helped implement.)

Here’s a screen shot of one of our demo systems there is a LOT here.

Screen shot of a system that’s using a lot of Fiori Launchpad tiles

The original idea of the Fiori Launchpad was that a user would be able to see all their important information in one place and drill down to bits that stood out. Of course, that doesn’t work because having pages of stuff means people don’t look at any of it. So the idea of using machine learning to figure out which bits to surface for a person to look at, makes great sense.

The problem is that in many cases SuccessFactors doesn’t know what’s important.

This is especially the case for extension use cases and the “We don’t use just SAP SuccessFactors for all our people processes” use case.

Here’s a couple of examples from one customer I work with:

“My Team” tiles: approve leave requests and Leave balance for my team

These two existing home page tiles, “Legacy” I believe the terminology is now, link off to BTP Cloud Portal, which then uses SAP Cloud Connector to tunnel through to an on-premise SAP ECC instance and display Fiori based apps showing leave balances and approval apps that are based on data still stored in SAP Payroll, not in SAP SuccessFactors.

It is exactly the same with these tiles:

Employee Self Service links to payroll (non ECP) applications

The customer also has additional BTP based extension applications – here’s one example:

SAP SuccessFactors Extension running on SAP BTP

All managers get the team leave balance tiles/applications and all employees (not contingent workers/contractors) get the leave and payslips apps. And everyone gets the Network Compliance App (it’s really cool btw, if you need something like this, please give me a shout!)

In the new home page these would ideally be part of the leave management quick links or approval tiles that popped up as needed, payslip tiles that appeared when payroll has been sent to bank (dreaming here about next gen payroll, but you get the idea). However, because all these tiles are just links out to other systems/application, they can’t be part of the “intelligent” framework and instead must be part of the “Organisational Updates” section of the homepage. And take up about twice as much screen real-estate. There’s also a limit on the number of tiles that will show in this section, so you’d better hope you don’t have too many custom applications/extensions that you want to link to. (Originally the SAP team had thought to limit the number of “cards” in this section much more, but fortunately a few more are allowed now. (Feedback works!)

New Home Page “Cards” – graphic is required. Sizing approx 1.5-2 times larger than existing tiles

Managing Sections with Permissions

So, whilst I would argue that custom cards look really bad in this new experience (they are big, chunky and not sorted into any meaningful categorisation, certainly they are not “Organisational Updates”! – but that’s a topic of a different set of feedback!), we’re only just now getting into the crux of this particular rant, which involves figuring out how to limit who gets which tiles/cards. In the “legacy” home page there is functionality which allows an administrator to create “Sections” on the home page. These sections can then be shown/hidden based upon Role Base Permission (RBP) roles and groups.

Capture of the “Sections” area of legacy home page configuration – access via “Manage Home Page”

It’s as easy as creating a section and then using the drop down to pick as many roles/groups as you want to allow to see that section.

Multi-select list of all permission roles and groups.

One particularly useful thing is that you can choose the system generated roles used by compensation, but any role can be used and this can can be one that is assigned to a population of “Managers” for example:

Standard role assignment screen, where a role can be assigned to a permission group or also to a set of automatically determined user populations. Very useful!

This gives a particularly powerful way to assign access to sections based on system generated subsets of the employee population.

Then we can simply assign whichever tiles we want to whichever sections we want and hey-presto, we have managed to use RBP roles and groups to restrict which users have access to which tiles.

There is the downside that quite often we ended up with a section with only one or two tiles in it, but that wasn’t so bad.

So, again, where’s the problem? Well, the thing is, in the new home page, you can’t do this!

Managing custom tiles with Home Page groups

The solution that has been adopted by the new home page is one that also existed in the legacy home page, but we didn’t use because it’s (my opinion) rubbish. When you create a custom tile you can assign it to a “User Group”.

Final step of creating a custom tile (very similar when creating a custom card) – assign a user group to the tile/card

It is possible to edit these user groups:

Dynamic Group maintenance for home page tile groups. (very similar to permission group maintenance.)

You’ll hopefully be familiar with the layout of the editor as it’s the same one used in managing role-based permission groups.

However, note that you are creating and maintaining “homepage tile groups” and not RBP groups.

There are some serious restrictions here – you cannot make these groups contain all managers for example or any of the other automatically built permission role assignment groups.

If you have an extension application that relies on the end user accessing the application having a certain set of SuccessFactors role-based permissions, then you MUST ensure that any editing of the home page tile group that includes the list of people who can see the custom tile that links to the extension application MUST also update the associated role-based permission group and the two must not get out of sync.

Work Arounds

Well – if you have an extension application that you only want to display to managers as a custom card, well, you’re pretty much stuffed – you cannot use the new home page tooling as it works today. The only way would be to manually maintain the list of all employees that are managers in your organisation. And, ummmm, sorry, this ain’t happening!

I’ve considered building tooling that could automatically maintain these groups based on similar logic to the existing home page, but unfortunately the APIs for dynamic groups are all read only and cannot be used to update a group.

The only things I have so far come up with to enable effective filtering and using custom home page cards are:

  • an additional extension application that is launched from the home page and then provides another view of which “additional” applications a user can access. In effect, a secondary launch page which provides the functionality to filter links to applications based on permission roles and groups that the new home page does not.
  • An application/integration that regularly goes through all users and updates one of the custom fields to a value which can then be queried by the home page tile dynamic groups (i.e. populate a “is a manager” flag against custom field 14 or something. )

In standard configuration it is still (thankfully) possible to use permission roles and group to decide which items are available in a given user’s navigation menu. Just like the logic that allowed sections to be permissioned in the legacy home page.

Configuration of custom navigation – menu item access can be controlled by permission groups and roles.

So, it is an option to remove these applications completely from the homepage, and just have them in the custom navigation. For those customers that don’t have a crack extension development team to provide a custom tile that can handle using RBPs to provision or not a secondary launchpad, I think I’d be suggesting that they build a custom tile that explains how to find the now missing links in the user menu.

Plea for support

Okay, hopefully you can see now why I’m really worried about the forced push to the new home page in 1H2022. I have spoken at length with the product team for the reimagined home page and whilst they see the potential issue, my feedback to date has been that they do not envisage fixing this issue before the universal migration to the new experience. They actually encouraged me to write this blog post because they want to see if others believe this to be an issue! I did ask them to just run a query on any existing customer that were using the permissions in existing home page sections, but I haven’t got a response on whether that is a large number or not.

SO… if you’ve read this and thought, “Crap, that could be something that’s going to cause me an issue!” Please, please, get onto the SAP SuccessFactors community web site – post your comments on the Migration to Reimagined Home Page Within 1H 2022 Release – Innovation Alert blog post.

Give me some “Kudos” for my comment on that post about this issue: https://community.successfactors.com/t5/Platform-Resources-Blog/Migration-to-Reimagined-Home-Page-Within-1H-2022-Release/bc-p/268878/highlight/true#M1833 and write about your own concerns. If we have enough customers express to SAP SuccessFactors that this will cause a problem we might just yet, get a solution.

Cheers! Here’s to getting the community involved!

I have some feedback for you…

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Right, this feels kinda awkward… I’m about to give Microsoft kudos and point out how I wish that some SAP processes were closer to what I’ve seen from the team from Microsoft. So bear with me if I seem a little less hyperboly than regularly…

This isn’t the Microsoft you remember

Recently I was working through the options for integrating SAP SuccessFactors personnel records into Microsoft AD, it’s something that every organisation that doesn’t have a dedicated IAM or (IdAM, however you want to make up your TLAs or FLAs) is likely to need in their environment. Have to say, I love working with new “start-up” orgs that don’t use an on-prem AD, but there’s not quite so many of those that are large enough to pick up SuccessFactors that they are probably still a minority.

Documentation is a skill that is distinct from development

Anyway, I happened to look at the Azure AD online doco about SuccessFactors integration and discovered it had been written by a developer. Well, that’s a guess, but seriously, who digs through the results of an API call to get config values out of a system when you can just use the standard tooling to do it? And then makes some poor sod document how to use Postman to do the same? So I suggested an update.

Arrrgggh!

no – just use the UI!

So, I was feeling benevolent and thought I’d offer my advice that perhaps there was a better way. I clicked the feedback button…

Shock horror – I wasn’t redirected to another site and asked to create a new user, I was asked to create a Github issue! (Okay if you don’t have a Github user, you’ll be asked to create one, but seriously, you don’t have a Github user id?)

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/62443

Totes easy!

And now we wait… or not

Then I resigned myself to never hearing back about it again… But I did!

Issue was triaged and assigned to the document author to review that very same day! (that’s not normal is it?)

I was – wow!

Then things got surreal…

Not only did I have someone look at and action the feedback that I gave, they then went and found my tweet on the subject and personally responded to it! Wat?

And now, the update to the documentation is about to go live:

And hopefully that will make some poor consultant/tech support person’s life a little bit easier.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

So let’s compare and contrast. And I know this isn’t apples – doco is different to application UI changes, but, lets compare the process at least.

I was working on the new SAP SuccessFactors IAS/IPS integration on my own company’s system when had an issue – I couldn’t figure out how to change some value in the config. Fortunately there is a partner community that SAP have set up for partners to discuss these sorts things and get some assistance from each other.

(Sidebar – Yes, I know it’s a bizarre idea, consultants helping our competing firms consultants do stuff. But in the scheme of things, the other consultants are all good people, they just aren’t lucky enough to work for my company, and helping others tends to do pretty good things for your own internal skills too.)

If you don’t know, then ask!

So I raised the issue in the forum and the really nice SAP person how has to read all my grumbles and moderate the forum raised it in the fortnightly call that SAP hosts for partners (it’s at 12:30am my local time, which makes it a bit fun, but better that than 6am!)

And there was already a solution! WOOO HOOO!

Pretty cool, so I had a look..

https://help.sap.com/viewer/6d6d63354d1242d185ab4830fc04feb1/Cloud/en-US/be6d6f210d30404d827f8c9e78ec4489.html

If you have to attend training to do something, it isn’t intuitive.

Let’s just say I wasn’t impressed with the UX and I realised why I hadn’t figured out how to do this myself! Because colouring something BLUE in an SAP UI5 app is possibly the least intuitive thing on planet to do to indicate that it is editable if you click it. Possibly the developers had played one too many games of Day of the Tentacle and thought users needing to randomly waving their mouse around the screen to see if it changes pointer shape is a good way to indicate to people that something is clickable? (Okay I doubt that was actually the case, more likely someone threw a guideline at them that didn’t make sense and they had to get inventive to work around it (been there!)). Pretty much everything in standard SAP UI5 apps are cyan or blue, and I’m not checking everyone one of them to see if it’s different.

So I gave some feedback on the forum.

I even tweeted about it. Cause that’s what you do, right? (Well it’s what I do. I mean there’s a certain type of person who stays up late at night writing blog posts about these sort of things, so what do you expect?)

This then lead to a bit of a conversation in my DM’s with someone from SAP (since it was DM’s I’ll not share, private stays private) who suggested that I really needed to raise this with support since it was an issue, and that helps track that people have issues. Likewise in the forums I was directed to raise it formally.

To whom it may concern

So I raised a SAP Support ticket (low priority since I already had a fully working work-around.)

I would happily have bet on the response, and I’d have won!

Thanks Mike – yep, the ole “Raise an enhancement request” gambit. That place where good ideas go to die.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead”

But by this time I was, “right whatever, lets see how far this sucker goes!” So I raised that enhancement request.

Oh – and whilst I was doing that, I came across a small issue…

The feedback site is hosted in Europe. I am not in Europe. But that’s cool because there’s this concept called CDNs, yeah, that allow large websites that are accessed around the world to be accessed in a reasonably fast manner from everywhere.

Yup – CDN wasn’t enabled. It is now – so the rest of you can thank me for suffering on your behalf!

Sod it though I’m gonna get this bugger filed! Oooh flashy light on my phone…

Anyway after much self flagellation

I got the request raised! had to attach my diagram as an “attachment” not able to be viewed inline in the request – but hey – it was raised.

And there it sat…

Tick tock…

Three weeks later my request was “Acknowledged”.

What’s the German word for “million to one chances happen constantly”?

And in the weird way that the universe works, whilst I have been typing this up, I got a comment on the request, strangely I didn’t get a notification (yet) but keeping my fingers crossed that sometime tonight. I did just check my spam email folder too, and interesting that it’s about 30/70 banking phishing scams and webinar invites, sure it used to be far more interesting. But nothing to notify me that my request had an update.

The really nice lead designer for the product reached out and asked me what I thought about their thoughts about making some UI changes to make things easier to use!

The response was awesome! I Loved it!

they ended the message with a request for my thoughts!

“Please let us know what you think.”

YES, YES, YES!

Well – I can say I was totally stoked, so happy! And then I tried to find the button to reply….

The irony of wanting to reply to a conversation about improving UI to make things more obvious and easier for people to use and then not being able to because the UI of the tool in which the conversation is happening doesn’t facilitate it.

Anyway. I did what I always do. Tweet lots, then try to figure out what to do…

It would appear that someone thought that it would make more sense for new comments to appear at the top of the conversation, not the bottom. So by clicking on the comments “tab” at the top of the page I was navigated up the screen and saw that I could enter a new comment. I did. And I tried to be very nice in my feedback (given the amount of huffing and puffing I’d been doing seconds before.)

Two ways of doing things, both with good result

So, we have two different scenarios, both ended up (or will hopefully end up with) some change in the product as influenced and suggested by me. Two out of two is pretty good going. However, one took 3 weeks, the other, over 3 months. One was painless and easy, the other painful and frustrating. As I said earlier, we’re not comparing apples to apples – getting a product changed is much harder than getting some doco changed. And I have heard anecdotally that some areas of SAP are even faster:

Interesting to note that the area that got the same day response that Robin mentions is also using the Microsoft Github tooling to manage issues. I wonder if tooling impacts delivery approach?

Yes – AND?

So what do I want to achieve by writing all this (other than hopefully amusing a few of you with the tale)? Well, I think it’s important that it’s documented how difficult giving good and constructive feedback can be. Only by taking a look at what’s happening can we get on the right path to working together to make everything we do better and easier.

I’ll finish by just mentioning that EVERYONE that I have dealt with when providing feedback at both SAP and Microsoft have been AWESOME. Both organisations do understand and value feedback. It’s not a people problem.