Beyond your ERP Implementation: Enhance SAP change management with DevOps

Here is a blueprint that guides you through the process and offers actionable insights for cost-effectively delivering rapid, low-risk SAP change. 

1. Establish Clear Objectives:

– Define measurable goals for your SAP DevOps processes. Goals may include:

• Reducing deployment times
• Increasing deployment frequency
• Improve the quality of SAP change
• Enhance collaboration between development and operations teams 

– Publish a schedule for deploying changes to QA and Production. Clearly define any exceptions

– Set up a consistent approach to resolving issues when they occur

2. Implement  Agile Processes:

– Adopt agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban to promote iterative development and continuous feedback. Break down large projects into smaller, manageable tasks like Epics and User Stories, and deliver them incrementally 

• Any CAB process must be streamlined and agile.  It can’t be a bottleneck that negatively impacts SAP change workflows 
• Processes must be consistent, yet flexible enough to adapt to changes on the fly 
• All team members involved in application development must be in the loop. 

3. Automate Everything:

– All team members involved in application development must be in the loop 

• Rev-Trac Platinum, the SAP DevOps Orchestration Platform, automates SAP change processes and integrates bi-directionally with testing tools and ITSM solutions 

4. Embrace DevOps Culture:

– Foster a culture of collaboration, communication, and shared responsibility between development, operations, and other stakeholders. Encourage cross-functional teams to work closely together and share knowledge

• Know it, embrace it, live it

5. Continuous Integration (CI):

– Integrate code changes frequently into a shared repository and perform automated builds and tests on each integration. By doing this, defects are identified and fixed early in the development lifecycle 

• Test early, test often

6. Continuous Delivery:

– Aim to deploy changes to all environments automatically and frequently. Implement release pipelines that automate the deployment process while maintaining control over the release cycle

How Rev-Trac can help

• Rev-Trac’s release management functionality is of big value here. Changes are gathered into releases. When CAB meets to review and approve the releases, they can quickly and easily move changes between releases. Rev-Trac’s automated safety checking ensures the movement of changes hasn’t negatively affected the release 

7. Monitor and Measure:

– Implement monitoring tools to track the performance of your SAP landscape in real –time. Monitor key metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR). Use this data to identify areas for improvement

How Rev-Trac can help

• With Rev-Trac, you can quickly identify and implement modifications to your overall change management process

8. Feedback and Learning:

– Encourage a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Conduct regular reviews to identify what went well, what didn’t, and how processes can be improved. Act on feedback from stakeholders to drive continuous improvement

• Not everything can be decided by committee. Listen to the ideas and use them to drive further improvements

9. Security and Compliance:

– Ensure that security and compliance requirements are built into your DevOps processes from the beginning. Implement security testing, code reviews, and compliance checks as part of your automated pipeline 

• Must have an audit– friendly process that ensures that someone is responsible for every step while enforcing the coveted separation of duties

10. Stay Agile and Adaptive:

– The SAP landscape constantly evolves. Be prepared to adapt and iterate on your DevOps practices. Stay up to date with the latest SAP technologies and trends and be willing to experiment with new tools and methodologies