Discovering the Workstreams

Project governance provides a framework in which the project manager and sponsors can make decisions that satisfy both stakeholder needs and expectations and organizational strategic objectives or address circumstances where these may not be in alignment.

© Project Management Institute, Inc. A guide to the project management body of knowledge PMBOK Guide. Sixth edition. 2017.

Project Governance includes:

• Guiding and overseeing the management of project work
• Ensuring adherence to policies, standards and guidelines
• Establishing governance roles, responsibilities and authorities
• Decision-making regarding risk escalations, changes and resources (e.g. team, financial, physical, facilities)
• Ensuring appropriate stakeholder engagement
• Monitoring performance

It is important in any project to have the standard definition of the Project Governance. It outlines the relationship between the different groups and stakeholders involved in the project.

The project governance describes the flow of information between the project and all the stakeholders. It specifies the decision making and escalation steps to resolve issues.

The governance framework has a couple of characteristics that need to be established. It focuses on realizing the business value, managing the risk and issues, and enforcing the standards and accountability for the project.

It needs to be aligned with the governance that the organization already has in place. It also has to ensure that communication and messaging fits the organization and stakeholder needs. Governance needs to be adjusted to each customer. There is no one size that fits all.

SAP provides tools to support the documentation and track the overall progress status. Traditionally, SAP Solution Manager was used but with the advent of cloud-based solutions, SAP Cloud ALM has become more common. For SAP S/4HANA cloud edition it’s recommended to use SAP Cloud ALM.

In an on-premise scenario, a project manager most likely will be using SAP Solution Manager to perform is documentation and tracking activities. In a cloud scenario, SAP Cloud ALM will be more common. The trend in SAP is to evolve from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM.

Both tools, SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM can provide the single source of truth for the project documentation, for all workstreams. Solution Documentation has now been used for more than 20 years in SAP projects.

This tools functionality can cooperate with other products, SAP and no SAP, for different purposes from documentation, testing, process modeling … one example that is taking a major role in SAP implementations is SAP Signavio.

The Project Manager establishing the governance needs to identify the key players who will be a part of the governance and then build in the stakeholder group. Generally the key players are specified within the project contract or Statement of Work (SoW).

• Level 1 - Executive Board

  • Sets business vision and goals

  • Approves project vision

  • Delegates authority to Steering Committee

  • Allocates funding for the project

• Level 2 - Steering Committee

  • Approves project goals

  • Approves project results

  • Approves project changes according to delegated authorities

  • Delegates authorities to the Operating Committee

  • Escalates unresolved issues to the Executive Board

• Level 3 - Operating Committee

  • Monitors and coordinates activities in all workstreams of the project

  • Delegates authority to Ongoing Meetings

  • Escalates unresolved issues to Steering Committee

• Level 3 - Integrating Committee

  • Makes decisions on integration and master data management across projects

  • Defines integration and controls integration points register

  • Defines release strategy across projects

  • Ensures integration and consistency between deliverables of several projects

• Level 4 - Ongoing Meetings

  • Clarifies ongoing open issues

  • Escalates unresolved issues to Level 3

  • Makes decisions as delegated by Level 3

• Major enablement areas for the customer team are:

  • Solution Expertise

  • Technical Expertise

  • Project Management

• All customer team members shall have overview training on SAP Activate.

• Prior to Solution Validation workshops, guidelines should be developed and there should be a training on Solution Validation Guidelines.

• Solution and Technical Expertise training shall be part of customer team training plan, and delivered prior to Solution Validation.

• Workstream specific knowledge also transferred to customer team members during information and design thinking workshops within relevant workstreams.

• Register of Project Procedures shall be drawn from the project management plan, and the customer team shall be trained on these standards (and tools, including Solution Manager) as soon as standards are developed and tools are set up.

When a new solution is implemented, new learning needs will arise as impacted users will need to learn new ways to perform their tasks.

One critical task is the related to Organizational Change Management (OCM).

The purpose is to conduct all relevant Organizational Change Management (OCM) analysis (change impact analysis, communication needs and channel analysis, learning needs analysis, and stakeholder analysis) to develop and plan OCM activities for what, when, and who. This supports an efficient and effective OCM delivery impacting change readiness and end user adoption.

The next step is to identify and nominate change agents as the ambassadors to support the digital transformation.

When you look into the roadmap for SAP SuccessFactors and check the solution adoption workstream, it seems that the solution adoption is not much present in the early phases of the project. That is not correct. The emphasis provided the overview diagrams sets focus on some activities but once you explore the content (tasks and accelerators), you will notice that activities will take place. OCM impact analysis takes place in the Explore phase like for other roadmaps.

Customer Center of Expertise (CCoE) is an organizational model that serves as collaboration hub across IT and LoBs. The mission of the CCoE is to provide transparency and efficiency of SAP implementation, innovation, operation, and quality of business processes and systems. CCoE centrally drives continuous improvement and continuous innovation.

• Hypercare period or stabilization, is a period after go-live within the Deploy phase. Its purpose is to ensure that all critical issues, which occurred during cutover or after users started working with the system, are resolved urgently to support business processes operations.

• The most common issues within hypercare period are:

  • Urgent authorization changes, and

  • Questions on using functionality.

• Most common approaches to hypercare period:

  • Temporary procedure for emergency authorizations provisioning (artifact 'Project Procedure - User Management for Go-Live').

  • Distribution of Application Consultants among offices.

  • Setup of dedicated space where users may come and perform operations with Application Consultants assistance.

• Technical Architecture and Infrastructure for SAP Implementation is first captured during Discover phase and contains points of view on:

  • Data center strategy

  • Scalability, availability, and capacity (hardware sizing) requirements

  • SAP recommendations on system landscapes for a specific solution

• Based on initial point of view, initial hardware specifications are developed for purchasing hardware. Because detailed requirements and solution design are discussed during Explore phase. The sizing should only be relevant for Private Cloud Edition as it is the only on-premise approach offered.

• During the Realize phase, a performance test is conducted to confirm that the solution is ready for productive load. Corrections in hardware might be required.