June/July 2011

On Project Management

Turbo-boost your SAP Implementation by Leveraging Agile Methodologies

By Anurag Barua
Editor's Note: What if you had the ability to be agile during your next SAP implementation? Its possible with Agile methodology. Anurag Barua describes this project management approach and how he has successfully applied it to implementations hes managed. He explains the Agile principles and demonstrates how this methodology is more flexible and responsive than many of its predecessors. Over the past two decades and more, as large enterprises worldwide started implementing and rolling out complex, costly, and versatile SAP applications, it became an imperative to adopt structured project management methodologies and practices. And while the industry-standard Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and the iconic waterfall was the inspiration for and general framework that enterprises followed, it became obvious that it was too generic a standard to be transplanted into the highly complex SAP realm. Besides, there are inefficiencies in this model that are exacerbated in this age of cost containment and the need for speedy solutions. In response to the evolving needs of enterprises worldwide, project management personnel as well as developers have come up with several alternative methodologies over the past few years. The essence of these alternative approaches is speed and controlled chaos. Further, these approaches emphasize pragmatism over a copybook approach. The most famous of these new methodologies is Rapid The essence of Application Development (RAD). In this article, I will present an these alternative overview of one approach - Agile - that is gaining a lot of approaches is attention and acceptance globally and also share with you my speed and recommendations on how Agile can be leveraged in an SAP controlled chaos. environment.

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Turbo-boost your SAP Implementation by Leveraging Agile Methodologies

ASAP: A Quick Recap

An SAP standard, this project management methodology (that stands for Accelerated SAP) is intended to accelerate the project implementation timeline. Figure 1 displays the components of the ASAP methodology.

Figure 1: SAPs Standard ASAP Project Management Framework (Source: SAP) ASAP methodology divides an SAP implementation into five discrete phases: Project Preparation: Includes project initiation activities such as creating the project charter, project plan, project kick-off and taking care of logistics. Business Blueprint: Requirements gathering, identifying business processes in scope, fit-gap analysis between standard SAP functionality and requirements and more. Realization: Development and configuration to meet the business requirements, unit testing, definition of requirements for migrating data from legacy systems to a future SAP environment, etc. Final Preparation: Quality assurance activities including functional, integration, and stress testing, and change management activities (user training, laying out support framework). Go Live and Support: Data migration from legacy to SAP environment, cutover from legacy to the new SAP environment, post go-live support from the support team.

A little introspection on this approach will reveal that it is siloed and discrete instead of continuous and iterative. In my own experience with large, complex SAP implementations, I have never had the delight of being able to execute a project in such a copybook fashion. And almost everyone who has ever run an SAP project big or small is quite likely to agree with me. In reality, every SAP implementation is a complex endeavor containing numerous moving parts that are frequently intertwined and often require feedback loops. The absence of such feedback loops and iteration is a chief contributor to projects going over-budget or not meeting customer expectations despite being on budget. In recent years, as SAP has continued to aggressively move towards new technologies such as web-based applications, integration with mobile devices, and Business Intelligence tools, this ASAP-based one-size-fits-all approach has further complicated the planning and execution of SAP implementations. Such applications inherently require your project management to be

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Turbo-boost your SAP Implementation by Leveraging Agile Methodologies

nimble, activities to be incremental and iterative (without clean baton hand-offs), and your user community to be constantly involved. In the past few years, there has been a growing realization in the SAP community of the need for alternative approaches to SAP project management. Fortunately, there has not been any need to reinvent the wheel; in the world of traditional software development, there has been a lot of activity in this area and several alternative approaches have been developed and formalized. To me, the real challenge is in incorporating these alternative approaches into the SAP project management framework.

Agile: A Paradigm Shift

Of all these alternative approaches, the one that is most grounded in reality and feasibility and gaining significant acceptance worldwide is Agile. Agile is an umbrella term for a group of approaches that are iterative, incremental, and fast-paced in nature. The genesis of Agile is the Agile Manifesto that was published a decade ago. The key principles of the Agile methodology are enshrined in this manifesto thus: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan. Clearly, Agile is rooted in the (correct) belief that in the realm of software development, a rigid adherence to processes and tools is not possible. The reasons behind this are simple: customer requirements are seldom precise and therefore, software development is rarely a cut-and-dried process. During a project, your design may have to change multiple times and project teams need to have the flexibility to respond to these changes in a rapid manner, while getting quick validation from the user community. Since it is rare for a project team to be able to capture all the requirements precisely during the requirements gathering stage, it is imperative that there is continuous interaction with the customer throughout the project. Agile assumes with good reason that the customer is most likely to be satisfied with functioning software rather than with status updates and slide decks. Therefore, it is important to develop in short and rapid spurts, to demonstrate the developed functionality to your customer, and to incorporate their feedback. Further, it is counter-productive to quibble over small changes to scope. While it is absolutely reasonable to push back on scope changes, most project teams spend a whole lot of time arguing over whether a certain (new) need is a scope change. It would probably take less time to simply incorporate the change. You have probably come across some of the most common renditions of Agile such as Extreme Programming (or XP as it commonly called) and Scrum, an approach that emphasizes iterative development in phases termed as sprints utilizing self-empowered teams with a high level of cohesion and communication between its members. There are quite a few things in common between Agile and its most famous precursor, Rapid Application Development (RAD).

Applying Agile Principles to SAP Projects

At this time, you must be wondering how you can reconcile the seemingly chaotic style of Agile with the structured ASAP approach. Having grappled with this quandary for many years, I have arrived at an approach that combines both approaches and leverages the strengths of each. An SAP implementation project is often a combination of multiple sub-projects and these subprojects often end up in being big projects themselves. I recommend applying Agile principles to these sub-projects, while still operating under the bigger ASAP umbrella. I have employed this
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Turbo-boost your SAP Implementation by Leveraging Agile Methodologies

myself successfully. In Figure 2, I have tried to capture the essence of how you would employ Agile in SAP sub-projects.

Figure 2: Agile in SAP Sub-projects Here are the key principles to this combined approach: Regular customer interaction: The project team will need interaction with the customer at various levels soon after your project kicks off and then on a regular basis. Your interaction needs to start during the project preparation phase and continue throughout the life-cycle of the project, all the way to the go live and support phases. Agile cannot be successful without this regular interaction. Continuous requirements gathering: Unlike with traditional approaches, the process of gathering customer/business requirements is not a one-time process but an ongoing one. This often comes as a shock to those who have spent entire careers in traditional SDLC methodologies. But remember, Agile is a paradigm shift from the past and you will need to adopt fast. Typically, you could find that there are still a few gaps even right before go-live and even after all testing has been completed. You will need to close these gaps either before or after go-live. You can spend a lot of time and money debating over in-scope or out-of-scope but if your customer will not be satisfied without these gaps being closed, this debate will become moot. Empowerment of development and configuration teams: Agiles success is predicated on empowering your development and configuration teams to not only complete project work but also to provide fair effort estimates. A relationship of trust will therefore need to be built between the project manager and the team. Agile requires teams to be self-directed and capable of making the right decisions. Regular testing and validation by customer/business: Regular testing and validation is required from your business users in order for this model to be successful. Since development will be in short spurts, this sort of feedback is integral to providing the functionality that your customer needs. Besides, it also enables you to course-correct and/or tweak without your going too far down the road. In ASAP, user testing is part of the Realization phase. In Agile, it is part of every phase. In fact, on certain projects, I have had business do testing daily and provide daily feedback.

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Turbo-boost your SAP Implementation by Leveraging Agile Methodologies

Speedy release/transport management procedures: Alas, being nimble and adhering to governance seldom go hand-in-hand. In a traditional SAP implementation framework, developments are generally bundled (in the form of change requests or transports) and then released in a certain frequency. This frequency is rarely more than once a week or even once every couple of weeks. Unfortunately, this is grossly insufficient in the Agile world. The iterative nature of this approach makes it necessary for transports to be released on almost a daily basis (for those from your Development to your Quality Assurance environment) for daily testing. Transports from your Quality Assurance to Production environment will also need to be quite frequent if not daily, then possibly once every two or three days. My experience with this recommendation has not been a pleasant one most project governance personnel are usually horrified and feel that this is a recipe for chaos. It does not have to be so. I am not advocating circumventing governance but recommending increasing the frequency of transports, keeping the governance and approval policies the same. Target good: Project teams often get wrapped up over attaining perfection. Sometimes, they are guilty of getting carried away with taking their work to a higher level. Lets say you are designing an interface in SAP that enables the user to load a flat file from a legacy system to your SAP application server. The business users expectation of this interface is likely to be very straight-forward. As a designer/developer, your job therefore is to build this simple interface and ensure that it functions as expected and not spend any time in adding sophistication or extra features. You should then demonstrate the functionality to your users, have them test it and solicit their feedback. Only when they see it will they have some frame of reference and can tell you if what you built meets their expectations. Your goal therefore is to develop something that is good as opposed to trying to create a masterpiece. Continuous Improvement: There may seem to be a contradiction between the previous point and this one. Actually, there isnt. Even as you target good, you should constantly strive for excellence. Traditional project management approaches (including ASAP) are focused on meeting customer requirements. In fact, the Project Management Institute (PMI) the most global of project management standards if ever there was one considers the notion of providing the customer with anything beyond what is strictly in scope gold-plating. In the Agile world, you will need to continuously improve your product since you know that you could probably do a lot better than your first offering. Take the example of an SAP report that you would build in your ERP (transactional) system. The first prototype may be very basic and barely meet the customers needs. As you go through the iterative testing and development cycle, you should take the opportunity to improve on other fronts; possibly performance, look-and-feel, and even functionality.

Conclusion
In summary, Agile is a response to the evolving needs of enterprises worldwide to provide more for less. It is also a very pragmatic approach to software development that acknowledges the deficiencies in the traditional approaches and tries to mitigate them. However, Agile is not without its own deficiencies, and therefore I am not suggesting that it is a silver bullet. But with organizational commitment and internal discipline to accept and implement such a paradigm shift, there is no reason your enterprise wont benefit from this bold approach.

Copyright 2011 by Klee Associates, Inc.

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Turbo-boost your SAP Implementation by Leveraging Agile Methodologies

Resources

Wikipedia entry on Agile methodology at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development Agile development manifesto at http://agilemanifesto.org/ An aggregation of articles and posts at http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/interesting/index.html Website dedicated to all things Agile at http://agilemethodology.org/ A blog post called Agile Development What does it mean to SAP users at http://www.erpexecutive.com/2010/04/agile-development-for-sap-managers/

Anurag Barua is the director of information technology at a global utility company. He has 19 years of experience in conceiving, designing, managing, and implementing complex software solutions, including nearly 13 years of SAP experience. He has been associated with several SAP implementations in various capacities. Anurags core SAP competencies include FI, CO, logistics, SAP NetWeaver BW, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), SAP Solution Manager, SAP NetWeaver tools and technologies, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, reporting, and project management. Anurag is a frequent speaker at SAP conferences and contributes to several publications. He holds a BS degree in computer science and an MBA degree in finance. He also is a PMI-certified PMP. You may contact the author at SAP.Authors@ERPtips.com. Be sure to mention the authors name and/or the article title.

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