Hey S4 Project Managers - Which Category Would You Fit In?

Ever since the publication of my last article on  SAP Solution Manager 7.2 usage in S4HANA projects, I got many queries from all nooks and corner of the world from several Project Managers on the article and it's relevance for them. I would say Mission Accomplished ! , even if 1 in 10 of them managed to consider ALM concepts right from the project initiation. Over the last year, more and more Project Managers are getting educated and attempting ACTIVATE certification as I see from my LinkedIn feed . That is a good sign If you ask me. In recent years, SAP spent tons of money in campaigns and customer education summits to promote the usage of ALM concepts in customer landscape. Well, that was not the case few years back where the visibility of SAP Solution Manager was very bleak in SAP events. The one thing good that happened was the monetization plan for Focused Solutions, which gave a much needed breather and SAP had to bring SAP Solution Manager to spotlight inevitably. Eventhough, I am not sure how much SAP succeeded in making Focused Solutions as a standalone revenue stream and made any break even in that front.  The Focused Solutions is becoming the part of standard offering (i.e license free) from 2020 Jan. onwards and they are being offered at a heavy discount for customers who want to use it now. 

I am of the opinion that S4 Project Managers hold the key for the next breakthrough in ALM adoptions and how the Solution Manager would be perceived and adopted in coming years. The S4 wave is still strong and such business transformation initiative would give a fresh perspective to the as-is state of ALM tools and how they could be used in a better way in any new initiatives. The crucial role that holds the responsibility of customer education and internal team upskilling lies with the S4 Project Managers. As you could see I am still worried about the Project Managers who draft the SoW document with Solman as the "Early Watch Alerting" tool thereby shutting the doors for ALM concepts forever, at least until the go-live. 

Now coming to the topic, the intention of this article is to narrate the type of queries I got and my experience in dealing with them . From the tons of queries I got over the last year, one thing still baffles me that there is a vast pool of Project Management professionals involved currently in S4 initiatives who are completely clueless or having wrong impressions of the capabilities of SAP Solution Manager as ALM suite. Broadly I would classify them into below categories for narrating my story;

i. The laggards types : This is the most common type of people I have come across. They are very late to the game, Period. These category of Project Managers would suddenly want to use Solution Manager to salvage the User Acceptance Testing or save the Quality system which is dumping form Transport related errors.  Few google searches would give the half baked information on CBTA, and other non existent magical capabilities of solman . Thinking that SAP Solution Manager is the perfect tool for building UAT scripts thereby impressing the business users at the 11th hour.  Well, that is not the case unfortunately. Solution Manager is not intended (at least as of now) to be used as the UAT tool also If your functional/dev team have already messed up the transport release and sequencing into Quality system, Solution Manager would neither magically fix the Transport errors in subsequent systems nor retrospectively handle the change management.  

One very obvious reason for adopting solman so late would be the fact that Project Managers think, Solman Go Live happens in parallel with S4 Go Live. So I want to make things very clear here that Solman instance should be the very first thing to be installed on your project landscape and solman production system should be ready to use or "gone live" when you are about to close the Explore phase of the S4 Project. 

ii. The 'good old days' or stick-in-the-mud types : Well, we must admit SOLAR01/02 are the things of the past. It was a long time back when solman and the 'document dumpyard' terms were interchangeable. Some of the fuctional consultants who were part of ERP/R3 implementations during last decade who are now heading S4 Projects as Project Managers have the tendency to relate the word solman to documentation dumpyard. This narrow understanding would eventually curtail the usage of solman to Process Management folders and TS/FS being uploaded as attachment to folders. So we now have "document dumpyard v2.0" 

iii. Ambitious but not my job types: Many of the project managers who represent SI's in big ticket S4 implementations/migrations fall under this category because of their attitude towards solman usage in ongoing projects. It was very evident until recent years SI's followed "Don't Know-Don't Tell" policy in ongoing AMS engagements and implementation projects w.r.t solman usage. Since customer was mostly unware of the existence of the ALM concepts and solman as a ALM tool for their SAP landscape, these vendors had the upper hand in keeping customers at dark. Thanks to campaigns and events by SAP in recent years, more and more customers are now aware of ALM tools and their usage. The striking reality is S4 customers might not succeed in befitting unless they include the solman and it's usage as part of implementation contract with their implementation vendors. Because SI's always quote the contractual obligations and say "out-of-scope" for now and push it for production support phase. One thing customers have control and can do is, insisting on including ALM tools in the project plan from the very early stages of the project and being informed about the ALM trends via SAP events or education channels.

iv. Over ambitious or let's do all types: This over enthusiastic type of Project Managers are not very hard to find either. The turn around duration for S4 projects have come down to few months from previous multi year timelines. Hence it is unrealistic to push the solman usage to the maximum extent in each and every aspects of the project. The reason for this ? most of the resistance for solman adoption comes from within the project team itself since project team members are burdened to the core on the shorter project timelines and things to do in such shot period. Hence when project managers bring the solman word in each and every communications and force project team members to use it fully, the enthusiasm dies down and team members start seeing it as a overhead to their daily tasks instead of value add. I have seen one instance where a project manager wanted to use CBTA for each and everything in S4 testing, so much so that functional consultants had to learn and automate & build CBTA scripts in solman dev system first then transport them to solman production for testing runs where it had tight integration with soldoc & charm with change control enabled branches in process management.  As a Project Manager one needs to be realistic than idealistic in usage of solman features and how it is to be used during project phase. 

Then, who is an ideal Project Manager with respect to using the SAP Solution Manager 7.2 in ongoing projects? There are many I have seen and how do they become cool? I suppose, they would be like my fictional project manager 'Kumar'. Kumar is Cool, Be Like Kumar ( here is the link: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/story-kumar-all-star-s4hana-project-manager-his-stint-vivek-hegde/)

So, as ALM consultant , what do I think as the ideal usage of solman during S4 implementation which is practical and realistic?  What a Project Manager should expect and act upon when some one ( read it as "customer" ) ask about ALM tools and their usage in ongoing project?

Well, I intend to bring this lean & realistic usage in series of blogs in coming weeks hoping to educate more and more existing and future S4 Project Managers on most useful features one at a time.

 Stay Tuned !

Vivek Hegde @ www.better-alm.com