Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Ladislav Rydzyk
Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Ladislav Rydzyk
Eursap’s Ask-the-SAP-Expert article is a feature designed to give you up-to-date information on the latest SAP news, featuring key thought leaders in the SAP space, as well as regular interviews with the best SAP consultants in the business.
This month, we feature Ladislav Rydzyk, an ABAP guru based in Slovakia, who offers services via his own ABAP Academy, to functional consultants who want to improve their technical skills in ABAP. Ladislav has developed a powerful teaching methodology with proven results to boost your ABAP journey!
Firstly, Ladislav, thank you very much for talking to us. Can we start by you telling our readers a little bit about yourself?
Sure. Besides technical facts that we will talk about later.
I’ve been married for about 13 years and I’m a father of 5 kids.
I studied IT in Slovakia, but also in the US in High school, and a few months ago I decided to study at Harvard Business School Online to help ABAP Academy grow.
When it comes to my hobbies, I like hiking with my wife, playing football with my sons, dancing with my daughter, and playing chess in the morning on the terrace while drinking tea.
In the past, I spent a lot of my free time on volunteering projects, especially related to kids which resulted in co-founding a non-profit organisation helping disabled children in Slovakia.
And how did you first get interested in and start learning ABAP programming?
In 2006 during my university studies, I had a chance to cooperate with a company on ABAP-related training and started working on their projects.
Then I chose ABAP as my diploma thesis to help my university build training materials for our professors.
After a few years of full-time development, I became a Tech lead responsible for software running on dozens of SAP systems worldwide.
Tell us a little bit about the ABAP Academy and how it works. Who is the target audience? It would also be interesting to understand what motivated you to establish the academy in the first place.
Even though I enjoyed programming in my daily work, I somehow felt like I was missing something. So, I decided to combine my 2 passions:
1. Programming
2. My non-profit activities of helping others
That’s how the idea of ABAP Academy came to my mind. That’s also the reason why I decided to provide personalised 1:1 coaching programs and stay with my clients until they become confident and independent in their daily tasks or even help them reach their career goals, like becoming freelancers.
The aim is to help SAP consultants to gain real-life project-based skills. It means, that when they graduate from the coaching program, they already know what to do when they face any technical issue.
Maybe one more comment on the methodology… A few years ago I worked closely with a psychologist helping me with the methodology, where I gave him this task: “How can the adult human brain learn a totally new skill such as ABAP programming, even when working full-time?” Afterward, I incorporated his outcomes into the methodology which helps consultants reach a confident level within 3-6 months even without prior ABAP skills, which I am really proud of.
What have been some of the biggest challenges in setting up and running the ABAP Academy?
I lacked an understanding of business principles. Even though I was considerably good at ABAP programming and helping others to become confident and independent in ABAP, I was poor in marketing, sales, and running a business in general. And I still have lots of things to improve, but at least now it’s not a bottleneck.
Another challenge is balancing my work time with family time, which forces me to build a team. This results in looking for people who stand for the same values so that we deliver consistent environment and outcomes for our clients.
From your extensive experience, what are the most important or useful ABAP skills for functional consultants to learn?
When I talk to senior-level SAP functional consultants, they usually want to get to ABAP debugging to analyse their problems on the functional side.
However, many times, they overlook that debugging is mainly about analysing and reading existing ABAP programs, which is very hard if they don’t have any programming background. So, the most useful skill I see that functional consultants can benefit from is getting to a relevant level of ABAP programming. This helps them become confident in debugging and enables them to fix simple issues without the need to wait for developers.
Another big advantage is that this skill allows consultants to speed up communication with ABAPers because suddenly they can explain business requirements to programmers in the technical language.
Of course, I also keep hearing that consultants are not supposed to be developers, which I agree with. However, once SAP consultants get to a certain level of ABAP, they become much more effective and independent from developers. This makes SAP functional consultants stand out from regular consultants in the job market.
How do you structure and design your ABAP training courses/curriculum?
Firstly, we get on an initial call with the consultants to understand their work challenges, their current ABAP level, and what they want to achieve as their career goals. Based on these inputs, we create a personalised training plan/curriculum that starts from their current level. We stay with them until they are confident and independent working on their daily techno-functional tasks.
We aim to create a three-to-six-month training plan to help SAP consultants achieve their goals while having a full-time job.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of helping people understand and learn ABAP programming?
It’s the same as when I co-founded the non-profit organisation: helping others. Enabling them to do things they never thought would be possible for them to do. And then once I hear from our clients sharing their thank you messages, this keeps me motivated to carry on.
One of the most heart-warming examples was in the early stages of ABAP Academy, I had a client who wanted to marry his girlfriend, but her parents wanted her to choose a guy who earned more than him. So, he decided to get trained in ABAP to get a better-paid position. He rented a separate room with a chair, table, and internet to study. Within a few months, he got his first job, and afterward, when he sent me pictures from his wedding thanking me for his dream coming through, it was a great feeling.
One more example – I had a client whose goal was to become an independent techno-functional consultant because he wanted to be faster in his work so that he could spend more time with his sick father. Since he was working from home, it was a great opportunity for him to spend more time with his Dad.
Such aspects are the most rewarding for me.
We’ve all heard the line “ABAP is dead”, due to the new development tools on offer with SAP S/4HANA. But ABAP is deeply embedded into these tools, so what is your response when you hear these things?
The first time I heard about it was in 2007 after my first year of ABAP development career. SAP had decided to replace ABAP with another programming language (Java, if I remember correctly), but after some time their decision was changed because of multiple reasons. One of them is the one you mentioned, that ABAP is deeply embedded in SAP.
In fact, SAP is still investing in the development of new ABAP features even these days when they are also pushing into S/4HANA, Fiori, BTP, etc. So there are no signs that ABAP is going to be dead. It’s just going to be used differently than we were used to.
Especially for SAP consultants who work on business-related tasks, ABAP will still help them to locate the problem and solve it for their clients without the need to wait a long time for developers. Because of this, I don’t see any reason why SAP consultants should worry that they will waste their time when upgrading to ABAP. At least not in the near future.
What new ABAP features or capabilities are you most excited about in SAP’s roadmap and how do you see the role of ABAP evolving as SAP ahead with their cloud-first strategy?
I’m currently in touch with people in one product-based company who work on incorporating their own AI solutions into their SAP software. Even though there are still many things open related to privacy, security, and data ownership, this is the area I am excited to hear about.
That’s also why we have already incorporated AI tools into our coaching programs for our clients – to help them be faster in learning and their delivery.
If you could add one feature or change to the ABAP language, what would it be?
Not sure if it’s 100% answering your question, but back in the time when I was the technical lead in a German-based company, I had a challenging time motivating some developers to create technical documentations. And I keep hearing about the same challenges in other companies these days as well. That’s why I think it would be a helpful feature.
Actually, two years ago, I built such a custom auto-documentation tool for a US-based company. It scans through their standardised codes and automatically creates technical documentations in MS Word format containing information about the scope of their programs, its technical delivery, all the database tables involved in the programs together with their structures for better understanding of the scope, automatic creation of UML diagrams to have a much better technical overview of how the program was structured.
I believe that such a feature in ABAP would help not only ABAP developers but also it would make the lives of SAP consultants much easier because they would be able to read documentation instead of codes.
That sounds like an amazing feature – there must be a market for that! I’m interested, given your busy schedule, how you manage to keep ahead of the fast-paced world of SAP. How do you keep your skills fresh?
I do three things. Firstly, I regularly get in touch with friends in my network who are working on big, mid-sized, and small projects. This keeps me in touch with the trends and the newest technologies. Anytime I need to learn something new, I usually approach people who are experts in my network and ask them to do a 1:1 workshop for me. So, I hire experts in the areas I need to keep my skills fresh.
Secondly, from time to time I like to get myself back to coding. I usually prefer to get a part-time project for about two-three months.
Thirdly, I consult my clients about their technical issues in their daily work, so this is another way I keep myself up to date.
What has been your experience being based in Slovakia and engaging with the global SAP community? How is the SAP market in eastern Europe right now?
We mainly engage with SAP consultants from Eastern Europe, Switzerland, France, Germany, the US and Canada. And my experience has been good so far.
How do you balance running the academy with your other work commitments?
Well, it’s tough. For me, time management on a daily basis does not work. I plan based on focused seasons and milestones. For example, when I need to record new training materials, I block a few weeks for this. So, the majority of my time is filled with such activities.
For the rest of my time, I either delegate to someone from my team, outsource to an external company, or put it on hold. The planning is very similar to my family. When I have focused family time, I usually work two days a week and five days are my focus time on family.
However, when I have a working season, I work ten hours a day or more if required. Many times, before my kids wake up or after they go to bed. So, I don’t have any magic strategy to this.
Recently I talked to one of my friends who has built a successful company where he hired his own CEO so that he can do the work he enjoys doing. Since I enjoy coaching our clients, that’s the concept I’d like to build my schedule around as much as I can.
Now some fun…if ABAP was a style of music, what genre would it be and why?
Classical music came to my mind immediately. And why? ABAP has been here for decades so it’s time-proof, and it does not get old even after that many years. It’s sophisticated and complex, which enables you to create a symphony of something big that runs huge companies worldwide.
Lastly, the question we always like to finish on. What advice do you have for newbies to ABAP, or for existing functional consultants wanting to upskill themselves as techno-functional consultants?
When people ask me for advice about learning ABAP or becoming a techno-functional consultant, I usually turn the conversation and I start to ask to learn more about the individual first. So, instead of giving you general advice, here is what I can do for your audience.
I can invite them to talk to me 1:1 to give advice on their current situation, level, and goal, based on the options they have. Because here is the thing… ABAP is like an ocean. Especially these days when there are so many new things showing up like CDS, BTP, Fiori, RAP, Cloud,… It’s easy to get lost. I believe that such an option to your audience to get 1:1 personalised advice will give them a much better overview of possibilities based on their current situation, background, and their future goals.
Otherwise, any advice I give them here would be a general answer that may or may not be relevant to envision their options to grow their career and make it future proof. Because advice for somebody whose goal is just to do some debugging is totally different from a consultant who wants to become a confident and independent SAP techno-functional freelancer. So, during this 1:1 talk, we figure out what you want to achieve in your career and make a realistic plan for the next three-to-six months.
This 1:1 call will be all about you and not about promoting any training (unless you ask). It’s meant to help you understand the minimum input you need to put into your career that gives you the biggest possible outcome in growing your career within the next few months.
If this sounds valuable to anybody from your audience, they can reach out to schedule a call with me by emailing me at ladislav.rydzyk@abapacademy.com
Thank you for talking to me Jon, and to Eursap too!
Ladislav Rydzyk talked to Jon Simmonds