SAP Go-Live Lessons Learned

September 27, 2011 By Tim Cooper Leave a Comment

In real estate the key factors in making the sale are location, location and location. In an SAP project I’m coming round to believing that success requires testing, testing and testing.

A Short Selective Retrospective on Key Constituencies

All project events and project success stem from testing and testing well. I’ve written about various types of testing before and how that can lead to some confusion because of issues with definitions. Here I want to discuss some areas where testing really can make or break a project and ideas for how to minimize the chances of things turning out badly. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Testing, SAP Testing Tagged With: DataXstream, SAP, SAP ECC 6.0, SAP Integration, SAP testing, Tim Cooper

SAP Mid-Month Go-Live: Got the T-shirt

November 10, 2010 By Tim Cooper 2 Comments

Conventional wisdom says you don’t go-live with SAP financials in the middle of the month (strictly speaking I should say the middle of the accounting period, but I’ll say month as a generic term for the posting period). I recently went through a mid-month SAP financials and logistics go-live and so far it has been a success.

Initially the project team had the expected you-can’t-do-that reaction when the idea of a mid-month go-live was suggested. We took three main steps to determine whether or not we were crazy or had a viable go-live option:

We asked SAP. As one of the main participants on the project we got them to do an internal review with some platinum consultants with the objective of telling us why we could not go-live mid-month.
We asked our project team, both client and consulting resources. Again, the goal was to tell us why we couldn’t do it.
We Googled like maniacs to find something to support and justify the conventional wisdom. We failed to find anything substantial that would deter us.

Armed with the conviction that there was no reason we couldn’t go-live mid-month we set about defining the details of how we would pull it off.

SAP Project Management Consulting Clichés – Part 2

November 3, 2010 By Tim Cooper Leave a Comment

Following my previous post I got a couple of responses from folks out on the interweb and decided I’d steal their suggestions and expand on their consulting clichés. After all repetition and overuse are the start point for any cliché and this means I’m doing my part to sustain the cycle – reuse, recycle, renew!

Is Your Project a Hotbed of SAP Consulting Clichés?

I felt compelled to come up with a 2-by-2 matrix to help you decide whether your project is cliché generator or a cliché consumer.

SAP Data Migration – The Data Migration Plan (Part 2)

August 4, 2010 By Mike Salvo 1 Comment

If you are responsible for the success of data migration, you will want to build a detailed plan that will walk you through all of the three phases of data migration: pre-data migration preparation, the data migration itself, and post-data migration cleanup. I like my data migration plan to contain detailed steps that ensure that I don’t forget anything. Each step lists a specific named responsible person along with their area of responsibility and contact information. Unless I am responsible for executing the task myself, I prefer the named person to be a client employee (i.e. the business owner of the process) rather than a project consultant. This is where the responsibility should be, and it requires that the business process owners actually participate in the activity rather than sit on the sidelines and watch.

SAP Data Migration – Answering the Important Questions (Part 1)

July 13, 2010 By Mike Salvo 2 Comments

It is data migration time on your SAP business project. Whether your project is implementation, acquisition, or merger, the goal is pretty much the same: the seamless inbound acquisition of master and transactional data from one or more external data sources while ensuring that this activity has minimal impact on the rest of the business. This is where we attempt to move years of neglected master and transactional data from a loosely structured, anything-goes legacy system into a very tightly integrated and highly structured SAP system. You must consider the likelihood that the concept of master data management had not been invented yet when the legacy or source system providing your data was implemented.

How much data to move? How much data to leave behind? What to automate, and what to execute manually? How to gracefully orchestrate and execute a data migration cutover from one system to another? Where and how to fit the data migration plan into the overall business implementation plan? How to continue to run the business during the data migration phase of the business project implementation? These questions are all part of the planning fun!

SAP Upgrades, Solution Manager, Test Plans, and Testing

May 11, 2010 By Tim Cooper 2 Comments

In this entry I’ll pull together a few threads from previous posts (testing, documentation, upgrades and offshore development) and throw in some Solution Manager (SOLMAN) functionality. These pieces can be fitted together to help accelerate a project and testing preparation via use of the SAP Test Workbench.

Nowadays SAP wants you to use SOLMAN to manage your landscape and use it as the main conduit to interact with the mother ship in Walldorf. Lots of SAP installations use SOLMAN as a way to generate developer keys and as a document repository: valid uses, but only a small fraction of the available functionality. Let’s explore some more of that SOLMAN magic.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog, SAP Testing Tagged With: Business Process Design, DataXstream, Project Management, SAP testing, sap upgrade help, SOLMAN, Solution Manager, Tim Cooper, Upgrade, upgrade tips, upgrades

SAP Cutover Practice for Risk Reduction

May 6, 2010 By Scott Julian Leave a Comment

SAP system upgrades, support packs, or data conversions into production can be a very stressful and time-consuming activity. A good way to remove some of the negativity and gain confidence is for a ‘SAP Cutover Practice’ activity. Although this does require additional hardware (at least temporarily), the benefits from this activity are well worth the cost.

SAP Testing Preparation – Due Diligence

October 7, 2009 By Tim Cooper 1 Comment

This entry sounds like project management 101 and can be summarized as: don’t assume because when you do… and you know the rest of that one. The trick is to uncover your implicit assumptions, the explicit ones are easier to identify, whereas the ones lurking in your subconscious may only want to come out when they can trip you up.

SAP Testing Terminology – Common Understanding on Your Project is Crucial

October 1, 2009 By Tim Cooper 5 Comments

There are many ways to start an argument on an SAP project and here’s another one to add to the list: define these terms – unit testing, system testing, integration testing, regression testing, scenario testing, end-to-end testing, end user testing, user acceptance testing, stress testing, load testing, performance testing, string testing, usability testing, security and authorizations testing, cut over testing, dry run testing, application testing, interface testing, day-in-the-life testing. I probably missed a few testing types, but the point is there are many kinds of testing and the same testing may be referred to by different names.

Welcome to the SAP Project Management & Project Observations Blog

October 1, 2009 By Tim Cooper 1 Comment

Introduction

Welcome to my SAP project management and project observations blog. I’m Tim Cooper, an SAP FI/CO certified consultant with a lot of project management experience. My goal with this blog isn’t to make you PMP certified or to address all and any project management issues you may have. Instead I’m going to share some of my experiences from various projects – some good, some not so good – with the hope that you can make your project more successful. At times I’m going write about subjects that will feel like it is project management 101, but I haven’t stopped being surprised by how often my assumptions have turned out to be incorrect and need to be reconfirmed.

I hope this blog is helpful to consultants and non-consultants: it should help you understand some of each others’ expectations and make working together a better experience for you both.

Let me know what you think, but please be civil.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Project Management, SAP, SAP FICO, SAP Integration, SAP testing, Tim Cooper