How agile are SAP's existing customers?

With the usual IT project runtimes, however, the challenge remains sporty even if you start immediately. Support is therefore in demand.

There are plenty of them - be it in the form of best-practice examples, the SAP Model Company, the S/4 Movement program, or the SAP Activate methodology. Agility is the order of the day - now also at SAP.

Do you remember what Asap is? Accelerated SAP was a collection of methods and tools that was first used in 1996 (!). After a comprehensive revision, the SAP Activate Methodology is currently a lush fund of methods, templates and procedures for trained SAP inventory customers.

SAP Activate is characterized by a hybrid process model ("waterfall/agile") for the entire lifecycle of an SAP project, whether it is an efficient implementation, upgrade or release change. And this is equally true for on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid solutions.

Agility needs to be practiced

Agile sounds like quite a culture clash for an "old" R/2 consultant with a 2-phase Assembler-Abap background like me. Does agile make visions like "in time" and "in budget" come true for project plans? Possibly even with the desired content? After each sprint you are "done", promises the new software development world.

But how exactly does that work with SAP? Hybrid, waves, sprints, scrum, backlog, etc., there is no shortage of buzzwords in the agile world - but what exactly do my colleagues and I have to learn? Thank goodness we already have a few certified Scrum Masters in the company, they can certainly help.

Memories of 2010 come flooding back when we tried to hold our first 15-minute Daily Scrums. We were highly motivated, but had so much to talk about that our Daily Scrum was more like 90 minutes.

Agility must be practiced. Our decision for a toolset fell on the Atlassian products - Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Tempo and a few other ad-ons. Here, too, you tend to find your "way" over the years - and the appropriate mapping options.

Fitness on five levels

SAP Activate includes detailed descriptions of all necessary roles, from product owner to scrum master. Activities and competencies are described in detail and clearly.

But despite all the agility, there are also descriptions of classic project structures that are still necessary, such as steering committees or project management.

Despite euphoria for the possibilities of agile working, SAP itself provides key factors to consider. Five levels can be used to check whether (m)any company is "fit for agile".

From the project itself to the organization and its managers, it is necessary to check before the project starts whether the agile approach is really the right one.

The common waterfall method and classical project management are completely different from how an agile organization works. For such a paradigm shift, change management is needed, managers and team members need to be trained for the tools and methodology.

And last but not least, agile working must also be integrated into the corporate culture. If it is not, it really does degenerate into a buzzword: everyone talks about being agile, and no one knows what it actually means.

Supersize me?

The recommended personnel resources for agile projects can make you feel a bit queasy. With five to nine people per SAP module (!), the recommended Scrum team is somewhat above a level that is suitable for medium-sized companies and probably overstretches the possibilities of many companies considerably.

However, this may also be a country-specific problem: A medium-sized competence center in Austria consists of eight to fifteen team members, whereas in Germany the average is several more. This means that SAP Activate will probably have to be downsized somewhat in the Alpine republic.

SAP Activate is a good and practical tool to realize SAP projects in an agile way and to get them on the ground quickly - be it the change to S/4 or the implementation of a new application.

At this point, also consider the applicability of SolMan - for example with a fit-gap analysis based on graphical process representations or with SAP's Focus Build solution, which can also bridge the gap to the non-SAP world (JIRA integration) - your Indiv developers will be thrilled!