Manage Your SAP Project

Four Work Styles That Can Harm Your Project (and How to Manage Them) Every SAP project team is comprised of human beings with their own distinct characteristics, needs, and agendas. Successful SAP project managers find ways to keep those differences from impeding the progress of the project. Unfortunately, that’s a skill that is typically gained the hard way, says Rao of Deloitte Consulting. “When you think about what project managers are taught in order to be certified, none of this is included,” says Rao. “They learn how to manage a project planner, how to work a breakdown structure, and how to schedule and run meetings — but not about the challenges they’re going to have managing the people that are going to be involved in these projects. The best project managers are often those who have gotten some scars from dealing with different kinds of people.” So how does a project manager prevent differences in personality from devolving into multiple personality disorder? A good start is t...

The Different Types of SAP Consultants and How They Affect Project Success For a better understanding of the risks and mistakes that impact SAP implementations, I want to explain in a very simple way how I visualize, name, and classify SAP consultants nowadays, defining in general and SAP Consultant as a person who helps implement, maintain, migrate, expand, install, or customize any SAP business solution. In the SAP world, I see four different types of consultants “SAP Techies”: I am not going to speak a lot about them as I think they don’t really manage projects or implementations, and as such, are rarely the reason for a mistake. Typically, SAP Techies are programmers, ABAP specialists, Basis specialists, or software architects specializing in SAP solutions or trainer’s. Sometimes they are used as the “tool” that causes project mistakes, but this is mainly because of the wrong decision on the part of their managers. These folks are always needed in any stage of SAP projects or i...

Given that system integrators can execute an SAP implementation from anywhere in the world, SAP end users will be called upon to decide how they want their partners to deliver service. Rightshore! offers a helpful discussion of the various options in this regard, and their respective benefits. There are five basic implementation delivery models: External Offshore: External execution by offshore partners. External Distributed Delivery: External execution by nearshore partners, who subcontract work out to offshore partners. External Nearshore: External execution by nearshore partners. Internal Centralized: Internal execution by a single party. Internal Decentralized: Internal execution by several parties. The fastest-growing model is external offshore, which went from being involved in 1% of IT delivery projects in 2006 to an estimated 5% by 2010. Rightshore! points out that external offshore promises 15-20% savings over internal delivery. This is why many systems integrators, Capgemini ...

Now you are ready to go live with your productive system! Afterwards,the project team focuses on supporting the end users, for which training maynot be completed. It is also necessary to establish procedures and measurementsto review the benefits of your investment in ECC/ERP on an ongoing basis. Key SAP Services to support you in this phase include The Online Service System (OSS) Remote Consulting EarlyWatch Services These services encompass a series of remote analyses of specific ECC/ERP Systemsettings, with recommendations for improving system performance. The last phase of the implementation project is concerned with supporting and optimizing the operative ECC/ERP System, both the technical infrastructure and load distribution as well as the business processes. Activities such as the following are carried out: Production support facilities are defined, for example, checking systemperformance on a daily basis Validation of business processes and their configuration Follow-up trainin...