Leveraging centralized change control in your SAP DevOps strategy contributes significantly to a long-term sustainable solution, that allows flexibility as your requirements change over time.
In this blog, I will describe 3 key benefits of having a centralized point of control for your SAP DevOps strategy.
Benefit 1: Control
Centralizing control for initiating new changes across your SAP landscapes will have huge payoffs when the changes are eventually migrated to production.
Often, multiple changes to the same object are abandoned. These changes can be accidentally included in a future development change, resulting in testing failures and possible production outages. Ensuring every change follows your change control requirements will improve the velocity of low impact changes, improve audit results, and reduce your production outages.
Control of applications, whether in the Cloud or on-premises, is essential as it ensures all environments are managed by the same set of control metrics.
Providing additional control using integration connections with other applications, such as ITSM or Agile/Sprint based development management tools, from the central control tool is essential for a seamless bidirectional flow of information. As a result, you can control specific approvals of change in your preferred tool instead of requiring approvers to perform their approvals in multiple applications.
Benefit 2: Communications
Improving change communications gives your internal team a clear view of the state of the changes and keeps the external team well informed of the change request status.
Often, clear, timely information delivered automatically improves confidence in change delivery and reduces non-productive time to request change status.
A centralized change control tool will ensure that every SAP change will follow your communications requirements automatically. The outcome will be better planning for production migrations, project management planning “are we on time for our project?” and cross team change visibility.
When migration errors and migration safety control problems arise, a central control tool provides a single base for these for both support and projects across all landscapes. The central point of control should also provide a change audit log to report on all changes made throughout the lifecycle of change.
Benefit 3: Automation
Addressing change automation has many benefits for utilizing change control as the central axis for your SAP DevOps strategy. When you require manual work as part of the change, including those manual tasks in the process will improve the efficiency and reduce costs and risks for those manual changes.
By automatically evaluating your coding standards and object impact analysis checks, you ensure a consistent and enforced evaluation of your SAP code development. You will also meet your audit requirements, as every change has been pre-assessed before it is migrated into production. Automation reduces production performance challenges, as the known issues are identified and resolved before they land.
Automating data flow between your central change control and external ITSM/Agile applications will make it easier to obtain accurate change information and status. This also reduces the need for manual work to keep this information current and streamlines the change management process.
The Bottom Line
The core and foundation of your SAP DevOps strategy is using a centralized point of control for all SAP changes, resulting in a flexible, sustainable, and efficient model.
This ensures all changes follow your requirements, guarantees your change communications are timely and automated, and minimizes your manual change work during the change process to improve efficiencies and productivity.
Contact one of our automation experts for more information on centralizing your SAP change management workflows.
