Managing an SAP project is no small undertaking; large-scale projects such as SAP HANA migration can present a multitude of difficulties for project managers. But what are these challenges, and what can be done to overcome them?
Scale
A typical HANA-readiness project can involve tens of thousands of issues that need to be fixed, so how do you even begin to manage a project of such scale?
We asked this question a lot during our first HANA-readiness project as we wrestled with a mammoth spreadsheet containing over 30,000 issues in need of a fix. Traditional project management tools simply aren’t designed to process so many tasks or the number of team members needed to deal with them all.
Our answer was to build our own project management functionality into Gekkobrain. Simply developing the functionality to add unlimited team members and assign them issues to work on can help save immeasurable time.
What do You Prioritize?
Another stumbling block inherent in SAP project management is prioritization; with so many potential issues, where do you start?
All SAP projects are divided into three priority levels by an SAP Code Inspector before inception:
- Priority 1 Issues: Issues that must be fixed, or the system might not work after project completion.
- Priority 2 Issues: Issues that are not mandatory but are highly recommended to be adapted to improve runtime performance.
- Priority 3 Issues: Issues that are not mandatory, but it is recommended to be adapted for performance reason.
However, this has it’s limitations, for one it doesn’t tell you which issue to fix first for maximum impact on your project. This is where Gekkobrain comes in; our applicationcan not only tell you the issue to fix first for maximum efficacy, it also tracks, prioritizes and, in many cases, automatically fixes new instances of problematic code as they appear.
Tracking Progress
Finally, due to the complexity of most SAP projects, tracking progress can be especially difficult. With so much going on it can be easy to lose sight of how far along you are with each stage of the project and even the project as a whole.
Perhaps the best way around this is to work in sprints. The benefits of agile project management are well-trodden, but breaking a large scale project down into smaller, more manageable sprints allows for greater focus and your team to tackle the project one bite-size piece at a time.
Gekkobrain takes this a step further. Not only does it provide automatic sprint definition based on a combination of effort, impact and complexity; it also automatically fixes all priority 1 issues and most priority 2 issues. This saves you as much as 90% of the effort in getting HANA-ready, and also leaves just a few priority 2 issues that must be manually assessed and, in some cases, fixed.
Finally, Gekkobrain proposes exhaustive test plans to ensure that your code is as robust as it can possibly be. And tracking is simple, with Gekkobrain’s burndown chart providing real-time updates on far the project has progressed and when you can expect to finish.
SAP migration projects are complex by nature, and, while you’re never going to eliminate the challenges completely, what you can do is simplify the process and make things easier for yourself and your team. Our application Gekkobrain was conceived with exactly this simplification of large-scale SAP migration projects in mind, so if you’re planning a major project such as getting HANA Ready, why not book a free demo to see the difference Gekkobrain could make to your project?