Getting Organised for S/4 Success

One of the key parts of a modern SAP architecture utilizing PAAS and SAAS and a clean core, is to be able so support, enhance and rollout at the same time, waiting many years for a roll out to be complete is not acceptable when you?want to start realizing value as early as possible by?going live with an MVP and improve things. And designing everything for everyone in great detail building, deploying and hoping it will fit perfectly everywhere is pie in the sky. This is where the old ways (that sound like dark magic) heavily bespoke, S/4 centric waterfall, comes into competition with the new, clean core, technical objects?rather than ABAP, agile and DevOps.

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The new is achievable in?the clean S4 core?by putting S/4 in as standardly as possible. The SAAS components by their nature are standard.

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But where things become complicated is?in?the PAAS layer.?In the new enterprise?architectures, the bulk of changes will take place in PAAS/Microservices layer and making sure if it works is of paramount importance.

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Automated testing, savvy use of solution manager, and process, back log, and transportation documentation tools are all key to making it work, but the one thing that is?arguably even more?important is the organization of the support, enhancement and roll out teams. How can you have 3 product owners for the same technical object all with different drivers which for the support team is to keep the cost low and fix fast, for the enhancement team to stay inside your budget and deliver business?capability?improvement against your key KPI’s and for the roll out team to go as fast and safely as possible.

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So, you need to keep the team managing each group of technical objects together, the same team needs to fix, enhance and provide the roll out support. The number of teams depends on the complexity of the solution, but this could be up to 18 separate product and/or?object?owners for different areas or technologies. And they need to balance the demands of all parties, with a single backlog that meets the requirements of all parties.

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I have looked at extensively at clever tools and even considering building them in house, but in the end, I think organization and structure will trump any tooling which will simply become an industry on its own with loads of governance and complexity.

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One of my clients, doing fairly major roll outs at the same time as continuous improvements and support, have been operating in this manner for a few years… they do releases and face a limited number of issues.

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Factors that will be hard to overcome, may be the existing support, ADM and implementation contracts that are in place, but there is no evidence this solution costs anymore, finding partners that will work together or a single partner or in house team that will do and trusting that the approach will work. It will need a big change in attitude from existing support teams and project teams.

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There have been times in the past 12 months that I thought achieving the goal of continuous delivery in an S/4 roll out. This was just a dream and you either go back to waterfall templates based on a spurious set of requirements written some years before or get rid of the PAAS and go back to old school ABAP with lots and lots of spreadsheet and the associated teams to support.

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But I think there is an answer, organization, trust in each other and some smart use of tools.

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Please comment and enhance my thinking.