The executive sponsors from both the customer and the partner/SAP project teams form the Steering Committee. This group is responsible for the overall coordination and governance of the implementation project.
Key responsibilities of the Steering Committee include:
- Strategic Decision-Making: Handling critical decisions that impact the entire organization.
- Resource Management: Overseeing the project budget and ensuring the appropriate employees are staffed to the project team.
- Final Escalation Point: Serving as the highest level of conflict resolution. For example, if a specific requirement cannot be met by standard processes and requires custom development, the Steering Committee makes the final call on how to proceed.
The project managers on the customer and partner/SAP project teams are responsible for setting up the implementation project in SAP Cloud ALM.
By setting up the project in this environment, the tasks and deliverables from the SAP Activate Methodology roadmap become actionable. This allows project managers to assign specific responsibilities to team members and track the progress of every deliverable in real time.
During steering committee meetings, these project managers use SAP Cloud ALM to generate comprehensive reports and status updates. These insights provide the steering committee with a clear view of the overall project completion and help ensure the implementation remains on schedule.
The customer system administrator (IT Contact) and partner/SAP lead configuration expert work together to make sure all required systems are provisioned. Together, they manage the authorization process, granting the necessary permissions to project team members to ensure they have appropriate access to each system throughout the implementation.
The partner/SAP line of business (LoB) configuration experts lead the Fit-to-Standard workshops alongside the corresponding LoB experts from the customer's extended project team.
In these sessions, the partner/SAP experts are responsible for documenting critical business process information. Configuration values are documented in the Business Driven Configuration Assessment, and extensions/customizations are documented using the Requirements app in SAP Cloud ALM.
These documented requirements serve as the blueprint for the Realize phase, where the partner/SAP LoB configuration experts will implement them across the following areas:
- Entering configuration values in SAP Central Business Configuration
- Defining business role customizations
- Building key user in-app extensions using the SAP Fiori apps in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Defining output management customizations
- Using the capabilities within SAP S/4HANA Cloud to customize relevant analytical apps
Additional technical experts from the customer side will be brought in as the extended project team to support custom integrations and data migration.
If required, side-by-side extensions using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) are typically viewed as separate projects outside the core implementation. While SAP or partners can be contracted to do this work, it's often more cost-effective for the customer to use their own internal developers for building extensions in SAP BTP.