Agility for classic SAP landscapes
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Months of practicing and testing ... and yet importing changes into the production systems is still often a "high risk, high drama affair" at the weekend.
Hopefully everything will run smoothly in the morning and production will not come to a standstill. It would be unthinkable if hundreds or even thousands of employees did not do their work as planned, customers did not order their goods or orders could not be processed.
If an "escalation case" occurs, it is expensive and solving the problem requires intensive and close cooperation between all specialists. So why not move away from silo thinking in a "plan-build-run" cycle and work closely together on a daily basis?
Plan-build-run has had its day
It is time for a rethink towards more agility. Also because digital champions such as Amazon, Netflix and Spotify are conditioning the expectations of end customers accordingly. The pressure to change is growing and has long since arrived in the B2B environment. Even in SAP landscapes.
The increasing pace of innovation and change is putting long-standing practices and habits in SAP operations to the test. Are new releases of once a month or even twice a year and less often still sustainable today?
Can companies still keep pace with the digital champions in terms of service quality, user experience and customer satisfaction?
Agile methods have been proving their worth in software development for years. DevOps, i.e. the close integration of development and (IT) operations, combines agile methods with close collaboration across departmental boundaries.
Even in traditional SAP landscapes, DevOps principles can be used to sustainably improve collaboration between development and IT operations: away from hierarchical silos and towards agile, networked teams. The new guiding principles are collaboration, sharing and automation.
Instead of extensive changes at long intervals, DevOps releases are deployed more frequently and in smaller volumes. This means that changes no longer necessarily lead to more failures and system downtimes.
On the contrary: The regular supply of production ("continuous delivery") becomes a well-established routine. Business added value is created on an ongoing basis without any fright. The risks of adjustments are reduced and confidence in the SAP systems and IT increases.
Impulses through tools
Automation tools such as Realtech's Transport Manager help to minimize or avoid manual activities in this context. Additional self-service access to important telemetry and performance data also enables developers and administrators to quickly identify and resolve problems.
Chat and collaboration tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, which speed up the flow of information, are also important. Last but not least, automated testing tools ensure the continuous flow of changes from development to production. Time-consuming manual tests can thus be reduced.
However, automation and tools do not automatically lead to more agility and speed. DevOps starts in the minds of everyone involved: it is about a new type of collaboration and cooperation between specialist departments, development and IT operations with the common goal of continuously creating added value for your own customers.
If this way of thinking is adopted, classic SAP landscapes can be further developed in an agile manner and the requirements of digitalization can be managed easily, securely and quickly.