Despite all the prophecies of doom

If the backlog is not clearly defined and prioritized right at the beginning of the "requirements to deploy" process, the project risk already increases: lack of transparency leads to delays and additional work. Efficient change management requires clear planning and control to avoid rework.

SAP has responded to this with the preconfigured best-practice solution Focused Build, making the existing SolMan solution more agile, user-friendly, and last but not least - through full integration - transparent.

For planning projects, the SAP ALM methodologies are a clear advantage: On the one hand, they build on the wishes of the user companies - with the SAP Customer Connect program, customer wishes have flowed directly into the product in recent years - and on the other hand, best practices can also be used that build on the project experience of many SAP implementation projects.

In Run and Operations, SAP has taken diagnostics, monitoring and analytics to the next level with Focused Run: Focused Run not only provides early warning of problems, but also extends system monitoring so that machine learning, pattern matching, cluster analysis and various visualizations can be used as well.

All the valuable experience gained from the on-prem products ultimately culminates in the latest product, SAP Cloud ALM. Since 2018, SAP has added Cloud ALM to the portfolio and can optimally support cloud-centric projects from planning to implementation.

Extensions to the range of functions are in the pipeline, so that by 2022 operations functions will also be available in Cloud ALM. The goal is therefore to provide customers with few on-prem solutions with an optimal ALM solution.

The strength of the products lies in the fact that the solutions are integrated. Individual areas are not structured in compartmentalized silos, but in value chains, which makes it possible for their advantages to interact. Thus, the solutions are much more than just monitoring tools: The products support entire scenarios such as "Requirements to Deploy" or "Detect and Correct".

Where non-integrated solutions have problems programmed into them because there is no up-to-date documentation of business processes or because related changes are not (or cannot be) tested integratively, SAP's ALM solutions, if implemented and used correctly, minimize risks and time as well as costs.

At the same time, both business processes and changes in the system become traceable, making audits unproblematic and the system landscape finally transparent. The full transparency is additionally underpinned by Focused Insights, with which complex interrelationships can be displayed in dashboards in a simple and fast way.

With Focused Build, every release with all developments and changes in the SAP system landscape is planned consistently from start to finish. This creates an enormously powerful ALM tool. While with "Management by Office" Excel spreadsheets are passed around and the search for documentation and dependencies takes on epic forms, Focused Build shows and manages all process steps in an up-to-date, transparent and clear manner.

Test scenarios are optimally integrated and supported. Tests are automatically repeatable and controlled in real time using dashboards. And since SAP projects need to become more efficient so that SAP user companies can cope well with the upcoming large changes, but also with the many small changes within a complex solution landscape, all these facts contribute to success. A professional ALM with Solution Manager and Focused Build sets the course so that a project can be completed reliably and cost-effectively.