Organizations must become proficient at SAP change management to respond quickly to the constant shifts in business needs in today’s digital world.
To keep pace with demand, eliminating manual SAP change management processes are a must.
Automation increases the velocity, volume and quality of SAP changes without breaking production.
Over the next 3 blogs, I will look at how businesses can control SAP change management, and some of the toolsets available during the various phases of application delivery.
- Control and report: ensure your organization conforms to a consistent process and understands the progress of project, and requirement delivery
- Build: allow your development and test teams to autonomously deliver high quality changes that rapidly meet business demand through collaboration and built-in safety
- Deploy: ensure that the quality of build is carried through to production using simple tools for assessing readiness and quality of changes with predictable outcomes for release deployment to production
Consistent and enforceable processes reduce risk
In order to manage to SAP change effectively, IT has to deliver higher quality changes, at great volumes and faster than ever before.
It’s essential for change managers to be able to recognize risk and react quickly.
DevOps tools are becoming more commonly used to assist with test automation and change risk analysis which can help you make SAP change manageable.
However, disjointed toolsets can make it impossible to guarantee that every change is processed consistently.
Meaning it can be a challenge for change managers to quickly identify and deal with undesirable changes, such as a change that has many defects discovered during testing.
It is the classic Catch-22 scenario. In order to understand what is happening in your SAP landscapes you need to be able to control what is moving through it, so you can measure for inconsistencies.
But, in order to measure, you must have visibility which typically requires implementing control points.
Enforced approval process guarantees visibility and control
The foundation of a DevOps initiative is SAP change management automation, implemented through a fully integrated and enforced change management process.
DevOps toolchaining enables organizations to connect multiple automated best of breed applications, supporting a single end-to-end change management process.
Automatically enforcing the process at the point where a technical change is made in the development environment, guarantees that any change that could potentially end up in production is compliant.
And the change is known to the change management team. m
Once the change management process is controlling the transports, bugs; enhancements; business requirements and project changes need to be tracked and easily visible to the various stake holders.
Real-time insight with customizable role-specific reports
Live and easy to read data reports are essential to acceleration SAP change without risk to production. All involved in the change process require critical reporting and metrics information to guide decision making.
Must-have insights include:
- Individuals: Work in Progress, commitments, defects and risks associated with their own changes and other parallel changes that may impact their changes
- Technical: Specifications, workloads, defects and alterations to their requirements. Also key is knowing which tasks are the highest priority to the business.
- Management: Progress of changes, outliers, high-risk changes and those which might not meet deadlines, resulting in potential delivery delays.
Rev-Trac as the starting point for effective SAP change management
Rev-Trac’s SAP change management automation platform provides a fully configurable workflow engine for the foundation of an organization’s DevOps – Change Management toolchain.
The processes can be fully customized and plugged into any API-enabled tool for bi-directional, dependency driven integration.
Rev-Trac’s enforcement capabilities guarantee that any SAP system change is captured and forced to be tied to a Rev-Trac request, helping you meet business objectives.
Automatic preliminary checks ensure the risk and dependencies on parallel change are accounted for from the very beginning.
Rev-Trac’s Web-based Dashboard and Reporting suite enables the customization of dashboard to provide an uncapped number of metrics that can be reported against.
This means all members contributing to or benefitting from an organization’s SAP development and delivery can be assured of being informed and in control of their necessary KPIs.
Next week – the build phase
In next week’s blog, I will discuss critical elements for managing SAP change effectively during the build phase.
