Establishing Effective Project Governance for SAP Projects

In the enablement strategy unit, we looked at governance, at a high level. As enablement lead, following a clear governance approach throughout the enablement project is one of the key tasks to ensure project success.

As an enablement lead, you will be invited to project team meetings. The cadence of these meetings varies from project to project.

It's important to comprehend the significance of all meetings you are required to attend and schedule and conduct your own meetings with a regular cadence. The aim is to maximize productivity and ensure that all stakeholders are kept engaged and informed.

To achieve the project milestones, it’s important to track every enablement activity according to the project plan. The enablement lead must ensure that everyone is aware of the enablement activities and the dependencies the enablement team have on other activities and teams within the project. As part of this, status reporting is critical to provide the project team with a clear view on whether enablement activities are:

• In progress and on target to reach the deadlines in the project plan
• Successfully completed on time

• At risk of over-running and need more time, which requires a formal extension of the deadline in the project plan

In the 4S Project, Grace reports to Ron Williams, the IT project manager, and Lucy Sheng, the business project manager. Grace is asked to submit a status report every two weeks.

Select each document below to review an example status report template in either Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint format.

Here is the Word document:

Here is the PowerPoint

In organizations that have significant legal and regulatory compliance requirements, the enablement lead must take the time to understand these and should work to ensure enablement aligns to these requirements.

Another significant skill for an enablement lead is identifying risk and issues and documenting the mitigation owners and activities. The enablement lead is responsible for contingency plans to take steps should any issues arise.

Create clear and concise risk and issue reports that accurately reflect what is happening in the project.

There may be a separate risk and issue log available to use in the project, follow the project management office’s guidance on this. It is important to log risks and issues in a central repository if the project management office has one available, to get maximum visibility. Or, as Grace is on the 4S project, you may be asked to document risks and issues in the regular status report, and these are included in the central risk log by the project manager.

View the video to see Grace discussing her latest status report with Lucy Sheng, the business project manager.

The video shows how as enablement lead, it is typical to find support for the workstreams when they don´t have enough time to attend training and to explore several different ways to mitigate issues that arise during the project.

Review the status report Grace has started to create:

Consider the video you just watched between Grace and Lucy. What are the important components you would include in the "Risks and Issues" section in the status report? Complete the row in the table of the exercise to note what was discussed in the call.

Now, let’s review our status report for you to compare your exercise results to:

As we have seen, project life is not always easy. There will be risks and issues for the enablement lead to deal with. It is important to use meetings and status reports to get your points across and to escalate issues to project management when you are struggling to get a resolution on your own.