Preparing the Agile Project

The Prepare phase, as per its name, deals with all kinds of project preparation activities. Having the contract and the scope document as inputs, the roles and the responsibilities for the project are aligned, and the governance is established.

Project roles are staffed, and trainings on the methodology and on the solution are scheduled. Some trainings, for instance, the self-enablement e-learnings, can be taken already, so that the team approaches the Explore phase with most of the knowledge prerequisites covered.

The systems needed for Fit-to-Standard workshops are made available – the initial environment is provisioned, and in-scope best practices are set up and activated.

Project vision and measurements for tracking progress and value delivery reporting are established. SAP Activate methodology Quality Gates are aligned and integrated in the project standards.

Specific activities need to be foreseen depending on the adoption option – new implementation, conversion or selective data transition, public or private cloud.

Documentation standards are defined, and tools for managing documentation are in place as well as approvals and quality validation procedures.

Virtual collaboration tools are agreed and made available for the project team.

The project kick-off is organized to mark the project start and to align all the team members to the same standards and objectives.

The documents identified as valuable deliverables for the project and agreed upon as part of the project standards must be managed during the project duration. After the go-live, this documentation will be very useful for the operations team who will manage the solution.

We may need to manage many types of documentation: project documentation, solution documentation, interface specifications, technical design documents, or training manuals.

All documentations can be managed in SAP Cloud ALM for the cloud solutions or in SAP Solution Manager for the on-premise ones.

Although SAP Cloud ALM doesn't have a document repository such as SAP Solution Manager, it provides capabilities to create documentation directly in the tool using the Document element. The document can be linked to the process to enable easy reuse of the documentation beyond the project. Documents and their status can also be tracked in the solution process traceability. 

In SAP Cloud ALM, documents have status, priority, and a human readable ID. Using the text editor, the content can be captured directly in SAP Cloud ALM. 

Since SAP Cloud ALM is a public cloud offering – free of charge for SAP customers – the storage is limited to 8 GB. This wouldn't allow the storing of many documents. Within SAP Cloud ALM, you have many functionalities to document directly in the tool using an editor. This content can easily be used in search scenarios or for extracting information using various techniques.

However, we know that customers still need to manage these external documents such as Microsoft Word documents, Excel, or PowerPoint. There are three options to manage these documents:

• You can store your documents in any local repository, for example, Microsoft SharePoint, and link them into SAP Cloud ALM using a URL reference.

• Integration to SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Document Management service using the DMS as content storage: If you want to have advanced document management features, you can provision SAP BTP DMS and use the integration provided from SAP Cloud ALM.

• Later (in 2024), we also plan to offer an option to use other repositories such as Google docs and Sharepoint via the SAP BTP integration.

SAP BTP DMS is part of the Harmonized Document Management approach SAP is following. SAP S/4HANA and other tools are also using this integration. The solution needs to be requested by the customer before the integration can be used. It isn't part of the SAP Cloud ALM provisioning.

SAP places quality at the center of projects that we deliver for our customers.

A Quality Gate gives oversight and early visibility into potential risks and issues.  It has a profound impact on reducing project risk and driving Customer Value.

Quality Gates Objectives:

• Assure quality at the milestones of the project.

• Assure that all key deliverables and actions have been completed in compliance with best practices.

• Avoid customer dissatisfaction.

• Enable project managers to continuously communicate and build quality into the project.

Quality Gates Benefits:

• Enhance project quality

• Minimize project risk exposure

• Manage expectations and monitor customer satisfaction

• Improve transparency of the project

• Reduce cycle time – get it done right the first time

We need to understand that a project Quality Gate isn't:

• A guarantee that the project will carry out no more risks and will never escalate

• A comprehensive project management review that prioritizes and reports all project risks and recommendations in a balanced way

• A detailed content review of all key deliverables of the project

• A complete view on the project, because the customer typically isn't involved in these sessions (as of now)

Typical exit criteria to be met are shown here. It should be noted that some of them may have to be adapted to the specific case.