The Innovate Faster with SAP Activate and SAFe series of articles is continuing with an overview of activities listed by SAP Activate for Realize and Deploy phases, with the intention to propose an approach for accommodating them in the SAFe continuous flow of value delivery process.
Realize phase considerations.
The SAP Activate Realize phase is driven by the Application Design and Configuration workstream that sets up the SAP solution for end-users' benefit (End2End processes), configures the user roles, the solution’s user interface(UI) and validates the solution interfaces with other systems.
What is an SAP Activate workstream, in the end? It is the group of similar activities that require specific specialized skills necessary to accomplish the SAP solution implementation.
Critical Note: Workstreams Should Not Be Treated as Disjoint Teams Passing Activities!
Besides Application Design and Configuration workstream, SAP Activate identifies also supporting workstreams, like, for example:
- Solution Adoption workstream that is elaborating the learning and training resources necessary to the organization to use the capabilities that the new system is delivering.
- Data Management workstream that is preparing and/or migrating the needful data for the new system to operate in close collaboration with IT and Business
- Extensibility workstream that is enhancing the solution by developing new functionalities (SAP Activate differentiates the solution configuration required skills from solution extensibility/development required skills).
- Integration workstream that is developing the solution interfaces with other systems (different skillset is needed compared to the solution extensibility/development skillset).
- Analytics workstream that is configuring the needful reports.
- Testing workstream.
- Technical Architecture and Infrastructure workstream.
- Operations and Support workstream.
- Etc.
The SAP Agile team operates in a cross-functional manner, comprising representatives from various workstreams such as Application Design and Configuration, Solution Adoption, Testing, and more. Together, they collaborate to plan and execute activities within their respective areas of expertise, ultimately ensuring the delivery of selected processes within the SAP solution to meet the needs of the business. See the illustration below as exemplification of an SAP Agile project team.
The Training Expert performs activities specific to the Solution Adoption workstream, whereas the Authorization Expert will perform activities from Application Design and Configuration workstream. It is, of course, desired that Agile team members develop skills that correspond to several SAP Activate workstreams, so that they can have a full-time involvement in the team. The target is to reduce time and know-how loss for handover activities between different team members and even between the Agile teams.
In SAFe, the Agile teams are cross-functional, meaning people from different fields of expertise are brought together and collaborate to produce value, the field of expertise being nothing else than the SAP Activate workstream concept.
Just as SAFe has Shared Services teams that are not fully dedicated to the Agile Release Trains or Enabling teams that are not directly creating new Features, the experts within SAP Activate supporting workstreams can also be structured as Agile teams.
Shared Services teams in SAFe often include people with the following types of specialized skills that are not coincidentally corresponding to workstreams specialties in SAP Activate e.g.:
- DevOps specialists.
- Data modeling, data engineering, and database support.
- Data migration and authorization support
- End-user training.
- Enterprise architecture.
- Infrastructure and tools management.
- IT Service Management (ITSM) and deployment operations.
- QA and exploratory testing etc.
After noting the aforementioned similarities between the two frameworks, we conclude that certain supporting workstreams may be structured as Shared Services or Enabling teams within the SAFe methodology.
The SAP Activate proposed approach for Agile teams’ collaboration and synchronization is through parallel Release planning sessions done after a number of Sprints (called Release) and through Scrum of Scrum synchronization meetings, during the iterations. Product Owners organization in a SAP Activate project is led by a Chief Product Owner that has full flexibility to decide how often is talking to the Product Owners and to the other stakeholders in the project .
There’s no need to underline here the similarities with SAFe regarding collaboration and alignment between the Agile teams as the two frameworks are having quite the same approach!
SAP Activate was designed to accommodate the project/phased approach. When working in a SAFe environment that uses a continuous flow approach, the workstream activities might need to be divided into smaller pieces that are sequenced to be completed in a Sprint – see the below picture.
These smaller activities are composing the Activate Deliverables, ensuring governance and quality gates to prevent the loss of essential content in an SAP implementation. Additionally, the aim is to utilize any available accelerators associated with the deliverables found in the SAP Activate toolset
We should note, as well, that SAP Activate provides guidance on which activities must be performed and what are the workstreams (domains of expertise) involved without giving any prescription for their granularity.
SAFe operates with short Iterations of two weeks, during which functionalities of small granularity are designed, built, tested, and potentially deployed. This approach transforms the linear sequence of SAP Activate phases into a smaller activities composing repeatable cycles, as depicted in the image below. Please note that the Sprint concept from SAP Activate corresponds to the Iteration concept from SAFe.
Realize phase specific activities like establishing the solution landscape and systems provisioning or data migration are translated in SAFe into Enablers that are preparing the system for implementing the Features. Some SAP solution specific activities might be more difficult to be split into small, less than 2 weeks effort/duration but most of them are. If you have longer running (longer than an Iteration or a PI), it must be ensured that those activities are spilt up into measurable and implementable items with a meaningful result of each Iteration/PI.
SAP Activate Quality gates concept cannot be transposed to SAFe as such, as we cannot talk about deliverables completion for project phases in an Iteration or even in a PI. For example, in SAP Activate, at the end of Realize phase, to pass the Quality Gate and start the Deploy phase, we check that „all configurations are finalized, tested, and approved in a signed document by the customer”.
The SAP Activate Quality Gate checklists are containing insightful solution specific questions specially designed to mitigate risks and they should not be ignored!
Elements in these checklists should be turned into:
- entries in the ART Readiness checklist (especially the Prepare phase quality gate checklist) – e.g “Is the customer’s end user team enabled for e-Learning and familiar with SAP Activate?”.
- nonfunctional requirements associated to Features, Enablers and User Stories - eg. "all configurations are finalized, tested, and approved in a signed document by the customer”.
- criteria for the Definition of Ready and Definition of Done for the Features, Enablers and User Stories - eg. “Does the customer require any scope items with extra licensing? Are these extra licensed scope items available for all countries in your project?” should be included in the Definition of Ready for the definition of Features, to check the prerequisite license.
- potential risks to be proactively managed at the Release Train level by the Release Train Engineer, the Product Manager or the System Architect - eg. “Is the integration to defined systems done for the P-System”, or “Is post go-live support process and organization in place?”
Deploy phase considerations.
SAP Activate Deploy phase key activities ensure that the system is ready for production use and that the organization is demonstrating high levels of adoption of the new features right after their deployment. Here below such activities:
- Resolve all crucial open issues.
- Execute transition and cutover plans including organizational change management plans.
- Complete all scheduled end user training.
- Identify and document all issues encountered in the transition to the new solution.
- Monitor business process results and the production environment.
- Track and report on value delivery.
In the Deploy phase, the Go-live date marks the date when the SAP solution’s functionalities are available for production use. The weeks after Go-Live are called Hypercare period, where the new system is further stabilized and optimized. When finished, the Deploy phase ends – see the picture below.
SAP Activate details these activities of making the system and the organization ready for using the SAP solution by giving specific guidelines by solution, for each solution adoption scenario (e.g., new implementation, system conversion, migration etc.).
SAP Activate manages the delivery of Features as packages called solution Releases.
A SAP Activate Release delimits the solution functional scope, that corresponds to end-to-end business scenarios supported by the solution. As the more frequent model of implementing the functional scope is process by process, translated to Feature by Feature in SAFe, from the provisioned functionalities perspective, in the implementation phase of the solution, we face more often the situation of delivering packages of Features than single Features.
In a future article that will cover the SAP Activate Run phase activities we will see that once the solution MVP implementation is finalized, the evolutive maintenance specific activities will become focus and, single Feature deployment can be more frequent.
SAP Activate Solution Release/Go-Live is sometimes possible only at the end of the PI , as there are activities having an extremely strict sequence in the critical path. Specialized Sprints may be needed to focus on data migration, process testing and other Go-live enabling activities.
To the same extent, Go-live preparation (cutover/deploy) activities, due to the SAP solution specificities are not always possible to be started from the first Iteration in the first PI, like data loads and migration, integration testing etc. It is natural to have Iterations more dedicated to this kind of activities besides Iterations focusing on the implementation of new functionalities – see the picture below.
As a conclusion, the activities specific to the Deploy phase can potentially be planned in every PI, if it is possible to release business processes or scenarios in isolation or after several PIs due to the monolithic character of the SAP solutions that cannot allow releasing processes in a decoupled mode. It all depends on the solution’s scope and team’s evaluation in term of effort needed to finalize shippable product.
As a reminder, for implementing a business process or a business scenario in an SAP solution we use the Feature concept for backlog management. Some Features can be released independently, some others are requiring other Feature and Enablers so that the deployed package brings value to the organization.
Deploy activities in SAFe are staying the same as in Activate – they are scheduled in the corresponding PIs. We could deploy just for Quality system at the end of each PI and to the Productive system after several PIs when the integrated scope is ready.
The next article in this series covers the SAP Activate Run phase activities and proposes an approach for accommodating them in the SAFe continuous flow of value delivery process.
Article References:
1st article in the series - Innovate Faster: The Power Duo of SAP Activate and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
2nd article in the series - Working with SAFe Epics in the SAP Activate Discover phase
SAP Activate Methodology for Transition to SAP S/4HANA - Roadmap Viewer (sap.com)
SAP Activate Methodology for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition - Roadmap Viewer (sap.com)
Shared Services - Scaled Agile FrameworkAgile Teams - Scaled Agile Framework
Main Reviewers: @Seb_Ziegler , Oliver Laufer
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