Adopting Software as a Service needs Continuous Change Management

For many reasons, Software as a Service (SaaS) has become the preferred deployment model for People, Analytics and Financial systems. Prior to SaaS becoming adopted as concept, companies were required to buy or build and maintain their IT infrastructures despite exponential costs and complexities. Prior to SaaS, processes were also very manual involving human intervention and supported by rules and hierarchies.

SaaS gives companies an alternative that supports agile business operations and support ongoing change. Now, they can plug in and subscribe to services built on shared, secure infrastructure via the Internet. The SaaS deployment model has flourished because of the many benefits it offers to businesses of all sizes and types. These are some of the key reasons that is driving customers to take advantage of SaaS solutions:

• High Adoption: SaaS applications are available from any authorized device - any time, anywhere. Because most people are familiar with using the Internet to find what they need, SaaS apps tend to have high adoption rates, with a lower learning curve. Look for applications with consumer grade user experiences, like #SAP #SuccessFactors.
• Lower Initial Costs: SaaS applications are subscription based. No license fees mean lower initial costs. Having the SaaS provider manage the IT infrastructure means lower IT costs for hardware, software, and the people needed to manage it all.
• Automated Upgrades: Because the SaaS provider manages all updates and upgrades, there are no patches for customers to download or install. The SaaS provider also manages availability, so there’s no need for customers to add hardware, software, or bandwidth as the user base grows.
• Simpler Integration: SaaS vendors with true multitenant architectures such as SAP can scale to meet customer demands. Many SaaS providers also offer flexible configuration capabilities to meet client needs, without compromising the ability to apply automated upgrades. Plus, many provide well documented application interfaces that let you integrate with existing enterprise resource planning systems.

The operational procedures of organizations generally encourage adherence to certain change management policies. Change management takes place during system implementation, often dubbed “the technical implementation projects” as well as after go live. After all, regular quarterly updates does mean that you need to keep track of what’s new and what to tell your end users and impacts on business processes. But, how should you organize your change management effort in an agile implementation? Are there special considerations you should be ware of in order to reap the inherent benefits of SaaS? These are some of my typical recommendations.

• Adopt change management as part of the implementation project. Read other articles about the SAP #Activate methodology and refer to the visual in the top of this article. Activities include communication strategy and plan, training strategy and plan as well as documentation strategy and plan. All these are integrated in the implementation methodologies used by Effective People, and built upon SAP Activate.
• Adopt structured application landscape. In order to ensure that critical SaaS applications are managed in a structured manner, ensure your deployment includes development, quality assurance as well as a production environment. Follow the tenant (instance) logic Development -> Quality Assurance – Production with regards to introduction of new features (check out the SAP Implementation Design Principle for instance management.
• Keep a change log. Create and maintain a detailed change log of when new features are released or functionality is removed. It is best for this information to be surfaced within normal use of the application and to include links to detailed feature overviews and documentation (SuccessFactors provides release schedule overview covering many releases back) and SAP also provides high level road map overview 6-12-18 months in the future.
• Give Advanced Notice. Depending on the depth of change, customers may need weeks or months of advanced communication so they have time to relay to their users.?SAP provides detailed release information 10 weeks prior to each release supporting this process. If your Development instance is on the Early Preview environment it is updated 4 weeks prior to Production environment. Understand and take advantage of this.
• Manage Feature enablement: feature flags are becoming a common practice to prevent beta features from reaching customers too early. However, by putting this power into the hands of system admins they can toggle the changes on/off in their instance when they are ready. However, it is important to communicate that there is typically a clear transition timeline when the feature will be enabled for all instances automatically. SAP provides administrators easy access to this via "Upgrade Centre" with embedded context sensitive help and valuable administration guides.
• Provide collateral: enable your process owners to deliver the message to their end users by using templates that you create centrally. SAP supports this via the Customer Community which has a wealth of relevant information to optimize your cloud journey, or you can ask a leading SAP partner like Effective People for guidance.

When you introduce the latest & greatest features or redesign of your processes you need to give the time, tools and collateral to roll out those changes on their end users. Whilst SAP generally applies a do-no-harm release principle, it is important to be aware of the planned releases. SAP SuccessFactors is updated 2 times per year, used for bigger improvements and introduction of new features or modules. Keep track of the release dates - they are announced at least 14 months in advance (dates of current release schedule here).

SAP SuccessFactors is designed and built as a pure cloud solution. It has a solid core that allows a high degree of flexibility whilst supporting the benefits or regular, automated updates. SAP provides a strong foundation to apply structured application change management, but does not remove the need for each organization to pay attention to new releases, changes and capabilities. At GP Strategies we encourage our clients to foster an agile change management culture around their SuccessFactors solutions because only continued focus on change management will ensure that the system and processes remain relevant and value enhancing.

As always actual recommendations depends on a variety of factors including industry processes and company preferences. Reach out to me or my colleagues for guidance and I welcome you to leave a message here.

Best regards

Erik Ebert

SuccessFactors Solution Advisor and Data Geek

Erik Ebert, Effective People is a trusted solutions advisor with almost 20 years experience in cloud deployments and more than 25 years in management consulting and professional services. Effective People is a longtime trusted?partner of leading companies and have more than 1000 cloud engagements behind us and 150 live clients being supported. Contact us for expert guidance on HXM and HR cloud topics.