Understanding Process Steps and Business Roles for Internal Project Management

• Manage internal projects during planning and execution phase
• Maintain work package staffing of internal project
• Procure external services for internal project
• Record times for internal project
• Analyze internal projects
• Perform accounting and financial close activities
• Perform period end closing activities

In order to work with internal projects, certain business catalogues must be assigned to the user’s Business Role (please see section on finding and allocating business roles in Unit 1 - Introducing SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Professional Services).

For internal projects, the necessary business roles are:

• Create Internal Projects
• Plan Internal Projects
• Project Staffing Analysis
• Run Actual Settlement
• Project Control Professional Services Projects

The figure displays the app Create Internal Projects.

• You can create internal projects with information such as the service organization, costcenter, profit center, project manager, currency, and dates.

  By default, the system displays the service organization of the project manager creating the project. The currency is determined from the company code of the service organization. However, you can change the currency to a value of your choice.

• You can assign people to additional project roles such as project partner, project accountant, and project controller. Users assigned to these project roles can view and edit projects.
• You can decide whether the project can be searched for and viewed by other project managers or only by the responsible project manager.

  To restrict access to the project by persons other than the responsible project manager and stakeholders, set the Public Project switch to No.

• When you have entered the required information, you can either choose:
  • Save to create the project.
  • Save and Proceed to create the project and continue to plan other aspects of the project, such as work packages, work items, roles, resources, expenses, and attachments.

You can implement logic for the following Business Add Ins (BAdIs):

The figure displays the app Plan Internal Projects (F1656).

• You use work packages to plan and schedule high level project activities, such as:
  • Work package dates and work items.
  • Required project roles and effort, the organization from which you want to staff a role, and whether the role is billable or not. If required, you can also specify up to five skills for each role. However, these skills are for information only and not directly used to search for resources.
  • Expenses
• For each role, you can search for resources and view details such as:
  • Contact details of an employee, work location, skills, and experience in previous projects.
  • Employee availability for the duration of the work package.
  • Employees whose employment ends before the end date of the work package.
  • Employee availability per month (in hours or days), for the calendar year.
    Note

    Availability is calculated based on the working hours per week defined in the business partner's master data, and staffing in other projects. If resource management has been activated, the availability is based on the daily working hours maintained for the business partner.
  • You can view and manually redistribute effort across the periods of the work package.
    Note

    If you change the dates (month) of a work package, the project dates are also adjusted. Besides, you must also choose how the system redistributes planned efforts. The following options are available:

    • Retain Total Efforts: The system redistributes equally, the total planned effort for the roles or resources in the work package.
    • Retain Efforts for Common Periods: The system retains only the efforts in periods that are common between the old and new work package dates, and distributes the efforts equally between the new periods of the work package.
• You can assign resources to project roles, based on the relevance of their skills and their availability. You can also use work items to assign responsibilities to assigned resources.
• You can confirm the staffing of resources when the project stage is set to In Execution. This confirmation results in staffing the resource as per their availability for the work package.
  Note

  If resource management has been activated, then assignments made by a resource manager are stored as staffing confirmations.
• You can manage documents for work packages.
• You can delete a work package, but only if there are no actual time or expense postings.

You can implement logic for the following Business Add Ins (BAdIs):

The figure displays the app, Project Staffing Analysis .

The figure displays the app, Run Actual Settlement .

This application that can be used as one common entry point for all customer and internal professional service projects.

The key features of the Project Control Professional Services Projects app include:

• One list that shows customer as well as internal professional service projects
• Show basic project attributes in a tabular form and search based on them
• Possibility to be enhanced by customer attributes
• Navigation to professional service project related apps, including creation of projects
• Navigation to related sales order and solution order (depending on user’s authorization)
• Possibility to enhance the navigation options by help of the business catalogs assigned to users

Reflect on a previous project management experience you've had in your professional life. What tools, processes, or methodologies did you use? Do you think implementing Internal Project Management, and especially the SAP S/4HANA solution, would have changed the outcome or the effectiveness of the project management process? If so, how?

In a previous project management role, I managed a complex, organization-wide initiative. While we had a project management methodology in place, the use of disparate manual tools for planning, staffing, time tracking, and analytics resulted in inefficiencies and information silos.

Reflecting on that experience in light of what I've learned about Internal Project Management and SAP S/4HANA, I strongly believe this solution would have revolutionized our processes. First, it would have consolidated all project management facets into a single, intuitive tool. This would have enabled smoother integration between phases and more transparent communication among team members, reducing errors and misunderstandings.

Also, using SAP Fiori apps would have allowed us to track our progress in real-time and make more informed decisions thanks to the cross-project reporting and drill-down analytics. The ability to perform quick periodic closings would have streamlined our budget control and made our financial processes more efficient.

Looking further, the systematic setup of SAP S/4HANA solutions would have also provided us with predefined processes, which would have reduced the time spent on initital project set up and allowed us to compare the project's progress against its original baseline. Overall, this integrated and efficient tool would have helped us improve our project management practices greatly, increasing overall productivity and reducing project risks.

In this lesson, we dove into the details of Internal Project Management, a comprehensive process that manages project-based services from end-to-end within a company. We learned that this process includes steps such as project planning, staffing, procurement of materials and services, time recording, accounting, financial closing activities, and project key figure analysis.

We highlighted the benefits of using SAP S/4HANA in Internal Project Management, such as the ability to define and manage projects easily, efficient staffing processes, instant cross-project and client reporting, and the opportunity to analyze performance efficiently using the provided functionalities.

We also took an in-depth look at the key process steps required for effective internal project management and explored the implications of business roles within this process.

The lesson then guided you through using SAP Fiori apps for creating and planning internal projects, focusing on managing work packages and resources, as well as understanding cost calculation. We also examined the purpose and features of additional SAP Fiori applications related to project staffing analysis, running actual settlements, and controlling professional services projects.

By learning and applying these processes and tools, you are better equipped to streamline your project management, leading to increased efficiency, better control, and more successful project outcomes in your organization.

Remember, the key to effective project management with SAP S/4HANA lies in consolidating all project elements in one platform for improved communication, reporting, and decision-making. Reflect on your past experiences and think about how you can apply this knowledge in future projects to enhance productivity and output.