Today, SAP IT teams are under increasing pressure to enhance their SAP change management processes and deliver more change, more frequently without breaking production. As a result, the need for transparency and accuracy across all aspects of SAP change has never been more important.
To help meet objectives, the latest version of Rev-Trac – Platinum 8.0 – integrates new features and enhancements that enable you to react quickly to changes in business demand.
The key to effective SAP change management is the Agile, Parallel Development and Release Management Workbenches. Using these workbenches enables SAP IT teams to:
- Support agile development for SAP
- Control parallel development
- Drag ‘n’ drop SAP changes into or out of a release
Enhanced support for agile SAP development
The Agile Workbench helps SAP IT teams to better manage change across their landscape, increasing the speed and velocity of change delivery without breaking production. It provides the necessary tools to improve SAP change management processes, understand the impact of more rapid change, ensures collaboration across teams and alerts developers if common objects are affected.
Fully automated, agile boards allow organizations to manage SAP changes or tasks from one or more Rev-Trac projects in sprints. The backlog of tasks can be easily prioritized and assigned to sprints for development.
Organizations can create multiple parallel boards and run numerous sprints at the same time, with different teams, tasks or types of change requests.
A burndown chart gives project team members, managers and business owners insight into the progress of a project, tracking work completed against time allowed.
Gain control over parallel development
Controlling parallel development is key to SAP agile and DevOps success within increasingly complex SAP environments. Rev-Trac’s Parallel Development Workbench provides the controls and capabilities to meet the needs of organization’s pursuing agile and DevOps for SAP.
Using the workbench, the appropriate user can approve or reject parallel development requests, redirect requests and view requests to which the selected object is currently locked.
It is best practice to ensure that a suitably assigned person who is aware of the production delivery demands and likely deployment sequence is providing approval for parallel development of a locked item.
Once the request for parallel development is approved, a developer can save the change to another Rev-Trac request. It is important that all impacted users are made aware that parallel development was allowed.
The workbench provides greater control over parallel development through:
- An active parallel development report that records all approved requests
- A Parallel development request queue that allows authorised managers to approve, reject or redirect Rev-Trac requests submitted,
- Cross-project locking, and
- An In-flight parallel changes report that lists Rev-Trac requests and transports to which ABAP Workbench objects are locked.
Achieve a successful go-live
Deploying more frequent releases to production can be a nightmare for teams that rely on traditional SAP change management processes. But it doesn’t have to be. Simplifying SAP change control through the use of automated and enforced tasks and activities allows SAP teams to realize business objectives.
Rev-Trac’s Release Management Workbench simplifies the collation, categorization and management of SAP changes for deployment, helping to avoid unscheduled downtime. Developers can drag ‘n’ drop changes into a release, allowing for more frequent go-lives of smaller functional software builds.
The workbench ensures included changes have successfully passed all test requirements and had appropriate approvals from the respective area owners before allowing deployment to occur.
Furthermore, safety and sequence checks will ensure that the transports are sent in the correct sequence and highlight any dependencies missing from the release.
There are many ways that an organization can configure the Rev-Trac Release Management Workbench to handle project releases. Popular methods our customers have adopted include:
- Wave Approach to Production Go-Lives
- Initiative Based Releases
- Hyper-Care Period after Production Go-Live
How Rev-Trac helps control SAP change management
This has been an overview of how developers can use Rev-Trac’s workbenches to become adept at SAP change management. For more details about the value Rev-Trac’s workbenches provide to SAP IT teams contact sales@rev-trac.com.
