Bärbel Winkler

lenastodal · ‎12-11-2023

I am a SAP Systems Analyst, living in Germany and have been active in IT since 1985, spending the first 15 years with PL/1 programming on IBM-hosts, followed by SAP ABAP programming, project coordination, error analysis and QA since early 2000.
I enjoy helping others, so SAP Community is a very good fit for me.

Bärbel, tell us about yourself.
Who are you, what do you like to do, what is important to you?

My name is Bärbel Winkler and I live and work in Germany. I’ve always been interested in environmental topics and for the last 15 years have spent a lot of my spare time tackling misinformation about human-caused climate change. Due to this work, I’m rather concerned about the threats posed by misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories to democracies around the globe. In my view this is a threat not to be underestimated.

What is your area of expertise?
What does a usual day at work look like for you?

After 15 years working on IBM mainframes until the year 2000, I’ve been active within the SAP environment since 2001, mostly doing ABAP development work and what all that involves, like root cause analysis in case of issues. Right now, I’m still working in “legacy” SAP systems based on Netweaver 7.50 which obviously means that I don’t have any experience with all the “new” stuff like BTP, CAP, RAP or whatever. Truth be told, I’m easy to confuse when it comes to any of that!

There isn’t really a “usual” or “typical” day as my activities vary quite a lot and there are not many regular or repeating tasks on a daily basis. I might work on a new program or changes to an existing one – usually grabbing some data and displaying it as ALV output – have some task and/or process-related meetings with colleagues and perhaps introduce a new developer to our development guidelines as part of their onboarding.

What inspired you to become an SAP Champion in SAP Community?

Here is a quote from when I was asked this question earlier as the answer still fits to this day:
„Quite to my surprise, I was contacted by Katarina Nonhebel-Schaefer (then Fischer) in July 2019 who asked on behalf of Craig Cmehil’s SAP Community team if I’d be interested to join the first group of SAP Champions. I was obviously delighted and honored to take them up on their offer!“

How do you learn in SAP Community?
What is your daily/weekly routine in SAP Community?

I usually have SAP Community open in a window to briefly check what is new and if any interesting blog posts or questions have been asked since I last checked. More often than not, there’s at least one item which is of interest to what I’m currently working on, so I at least skim it to verify my hunch and add it to my bookmarks. Sometimes, there’s a question from a fellow SAP community member which I can answer quickly. If I’m stuck on a problem, I try to find an answer in SAP Community and if there isn’t one yet, I might well go ahead and ask a question of my own.

What is your suggestion to get the most out of SAP Community?

As a first step, I’d suggest working through the tutorials available about SAP Community to get a handle on what all is available and how to engage best. Then, read some blog posts and their comments as well as some questions and provided answers to get a rough idea of how interactions in the SAP Community work. Finally, dive right in with asking your own question or providing your first answer!

In addition, I think that it’s important to be an active part of SAP Community and not just a passive consumer of content provided for free by others. If we all were the latter, there after all wouldn’t really be much content to make good use of!

Bärbel's tip for you:
Don’t ask what SAP Community can do for you, but what you can do for SAP Community!