Agile is a term that SAP IT teams are hearing more frequently these days. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Today, businesses across every sector, must react quickly to constant changes in the marketplace to survive.
However, to understand why it is such a hot topic, you need to know something about the benefits of agile for SAP solutions.
Simply, agile is a way to quickly build software and get it in the hands of end users. The focus is on delivering quality working software frequently, while reducing project overheads.
Applying agile principles lets you transform your SAP application development processes, improving efficiencies and removing waste.
The benefits of agile for SAP
Ever heard a developer say they’re passionate about writing code because they love documentation, contracts or a rigid process? Most will say they have a passion for solving problems or enjoy seeing dreams come to life.
The first benefit of agile for SAP is that teams focus more of their time on tasks they love doing, keeping them both stimulated and motivated.
Adopting agile methodologies delivers benefits to your business and project managers. Other benefits of agile for SAP include:
- Business Engagement
For your developers to meet project requirements, they need to constantly communicate with a business stakeholder who understands the necessary outcome and values a quality result.
- Predictable Delivery and Cost
Using short 2-4 week sprints and pre-estimated efforts for changes, you can anticipate the completion of new features and functionality. With a fixed duration and a known expected effort for the content of each sprint, the cost is capped and predictable.
- Allows for iterations
Teams need to focus on delivering pre-determined content for the sprint. However, following the sprint businesses can refine and enhance requirements, adding additional requests to a backlog which can be reprioritized.
- Business and User Value
Typically, requirements are defined by user stories, ensuring that outcomes of a feature or capability relate to end-user engagement. An organization’s ability to determine the priority of user stories means highly engaged stakeholders and a better business outcome.
- Improved Quality
The use of multiple sprints to deliver a project enables constant review, refinement, collaboration and the early identification of gaps in expectations.
Why should your business care about the benefits of agile for SAP?
Today, consumers expect easy-to-use interfaces on mobile phones and websites. When expectations are not met unhappy customers are quick to post about their dissatisfaction on Twitter or Facebook, for example.
As a result B2C companies are constantly investigating processes to be more responsive, improve overall customer satisfaction and innovate faster.
Many companies have a finely tuned, customer facing front end. More frequently built using agile methodologies. SAP back-end systems have traditionally not progressed at the same pace.
Demands for high quality and the need to maintain production system stability – known as 2 speed IT – restricted accelerated application development and delivery.
Now, SAP teams are under pressure from businesses to deliver more change, more frequently. Of course, with older methodologies like the Waterfall approach the payoff is often huge costs, poor performance, lower quality and ultimately dissatisfied customers.
To meet the current needs of the business in today’s digital world, organizations need to take advantage of the benefits of agile for SAP.
Rev-Trac Platinum includes the necessary toolsets to move your team to agile, ensuring a higher Velocity, Volume and Quality of developing and deploying SAP changes.
For more information about how Rev-Trac can help your business capitalize on the benefits of agile for SAP, get in touch.
