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Author's profile photo Vivek Hegde

PPM Projects integration with Change Request Management as of 7.1 SP10

When we used  the Solution Manager projects (SM Projects) for Change Request Management, there was a need for a bigger project management tool which would help us in managing the IT Projects in more structured way.  What I mean by the structured way is the seamless information exchange between the Project Management Office (PMO) and Change Management Team in a maintenance or implementation project.

Project Management (PPM Project)  is a cross-industry tool which is used to plan and monitor development and consulting projects.  Many customers use PPM to effectively manage their ongoing projects since it has wider integration possibilities (like PS, FICO…). With SP10, exciting things are happining with Project Manageemnt  in Solution Manager area as we are seeing Solution Manager maturing as THE TOOL for entire IT Management (call it ERP for IT). When PPM is deployed in Solution Manager system we see this new possibility of running the projects in a better way.

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Source: SAP

Using this;

A. Customer can leverage SAP PPM as the project planning and scheduling tool in SAP Solution Manager.

B. SAP Solution Manager tool remains as Project Excecution Tool and Change Managemnt is now Integrated to PPM Project Management functionality.

Solution Manager Project is assigned  to PPM Project and we can chose what type SAP Solution Manager projects can be assigned to a Project Management project.

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Status Mapping b/w PPM Project and Solution Manager Project is allowed. This allows mapping  SAP Solution Manager project status values onto Project Management project status values. This information is used to synchronize Project Management project status values to an SAP Solution Manager project.

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The Tasks in the PPM Project is where the Change Request is mapped. There are several ways to create  Change Request/ Tasks  in this integration.

i. Manually create transaction out of task: You will be able to create a transaction via a button, after the task has been released.

ii. Automatically create transaction on release of task: The system creates the transaction automatically after the task has been released

iii. Create task on customized action of transaction: In the transaction there will be an action available to create the Project Management task.

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The Change Request inherits the title from the respective Task.

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This integration allows the time recording features too, time recording can be done in Request for Change and the data is transferred to PPM Task. Another feature is  mapping the SAP Solution Manager status values of requests for change onto Project Management task status values. This updates the status of the Project Management task, depending on the status of the request for change.

Functional Restrictions

  1) You cannot assign more than one SAP Solution Manager project to an SAP Portfolio and Project Management project

  2) You cannot assign more than one SAP Portfolio and Project Management project to an SAP Solution Manager project

  3) You cannot assign more than one request for change to an SAP Portfolio and Project Management task

  4) You cannot assign more than one SAP Portfolio and Project Management task to a request for change

  5) No distributed deployment

  6) No integration of Quality Gate Management

  7) No Roadmap integration

  8) No migration of objects from the existing integration of Change Request Management and cProjects.

  9) No functional relation and no assignment between the new integration and the existing integration of Change Request Management and cProjects

10) You can assign only one SAP Solution Manager project to one SAP Portfolio and Project Management project. The relationship is always 1:1, so the

assignment to an SAP Portfolio and Project Management project is not copied when you copy an SAP Solution Manager project.

  11) When you transport an SAP Solution Manager project, the SAP Portfolio and Project Management project assignment is not transported.

  12) Not every SAP Portfolio and Project Management project type can be assigned to every SAP Solution Manager project type. The possible assignment

combinations of project types are defined in the customizing.

  13) An SAP Portfolio and Project Management project that is assigned to an SAP Solution Manager Project cannot be archived.

(Credit: SAP IT PPM presentation)

I am still exploring other features and very excited about this integration and endless possibilities we can now achieve with PPM – SM Project Management tool.  I shall blog my experiences in coming days.

Cheers,

Vivek

Note: The technical configuration of above mentioned integration is explained in this blog:

http://scn.sap.com/community/it-management/alm/solution-manager/blog/2013/12/09/the-beginers-guide-to-integrating-ppm-with-charm-in-sp10

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      21 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Joyca Vervinckt
      Joyca Vervinckt

      Hi Vivek,

      Thanks for sharing this.

      SP10 brings quite some new and interesting features, and this is certainly one of them.

      I look forward to your next blogs regarding this integration!

      Kind regards,

      Joyca

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Vivek,

      Very interesting, i wounder about reporting possibilites and also can PPM be integrated with MS PS.

      Keep updating this.

      Rg Dan

      Author's profile photo Vivek Hegde
      Vivek Hegde
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Joyca/Daniyar,

      Thanks for taking time to read this blog.

      Daniyar Kulmanov : Yes, Project Management part of PPM is already integrated to Microsoft Projects. In fact, we can import the Microsoft Project file into PPM to create a Project.

      Regards,

      Vivek

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Nice Blog!

      I now linked it in my general SP10 Overview Blog. Maybe I don't need to write another blog about the PPM integration after all... 😉

      Best regards

      Tobias

      Author's profile photo Ravi Ekambaram
      Ravi Ekambaram

      Hi Vivek,

      Thanks for sharing this information through this blog and came to know about this SOLMAN<-->PPM integration through this blog.

      Keep blogging about this topic.

      Regards,

      Ravi

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      great one Vivek..

      thanks for sharing ...

      regards,

      vinay singh

      Author's profile photo Mariano Sabiche
      Mariano Sabiche

      Vivek!!

      Excellent post blog!!

      Please, inform that it's only for IT PPM RDS in Project Management scenario.

      Best regards.

      Mariano

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Mariano,

      the RDS for IT PPM needs to be deployed on SAP Solution Manager in order to benefit from this integration.

      However, in general the integration is not depending on the RDS - you can also use this without having the RDS from SAP.

      Best regards

      Tobias

      Author's profile photo Wolfgang Mayer
      Wolfgang Mayer

      Hello Tobias, so is it necessary that PPM (regardless of RDS or not) is installed on the same system as Solman. Can you confirm this? If this would be true, this solution would be applicable to a lot of our customers since PPM (5.0 or 6.0) and Solman are always installed on different SAP instances. Thanks and regards Wolfgang

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Yes, that's correct.

      SolMan needs to be the system where you run your IT projects with PPM in order to benefit from this integration. This is not available if PPM is running on ERP, for example.

      Best regards

      Tobias

      Author's profile photo Wolfgang Mayer
      Wolfgang Mayer

      Hello Tobias,

      any chance that this will change in future and will work if the PPM addon has been installed on another server than Solman? As mentioned, our customers have separate PPM- and Solman system since PPM is mainly not used for IT but business Projects.

      Thanks & regards

      Wolfgang

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Yes, we are currently evaluating further options in this area. However, nothing to share at the moment - this takes more time.

      If the customers use it mainly for business projects, it might be an idea to use PPM on SolMan for IT projects. Typically these are different people/areas in the company - might this not be a valid alternative?

      Author's profile photo Wolfgang Mayer
      Wolfgang Mayer

      Hello,

      I'll send you an E-Mail with our current findings. Is Firstname.Lastname[at]sap.com the correct one?

      Regards

      Wolfgang

      Author's profile photo Lluis Salvador Suarez
      Lluis Salvador Suarez

      Thanks for sharing Vivek, bookmarked and rated 😉 .

      Regards,

      Luis.

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hello Vivek,

      Thanks for sharing such a interesting and informative blog.

      Regards,

      Vilas

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Vivek,

      Very detailed and helpful blog.

      Thanks

      Author's profile photo Raquel Pereira da Cunha
      Raquel Pereira da Cunha

      Thank you for sharing Vivek. This is one of the things we are planning to start using this year with SP10.

      Best regards,

      Raquel

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Thanks Vivek for sharing This...excellent Info

      Author's profile photo Smita Kumar
      Smita Kumar

      Very useful blog. Thanks for sharing.

      Author's profile photo Juan-Carlos Garcia-Garavito
      Juan-Carlos Garcia-Garavito

      Thanks Vivek indeed.  Kind of new to us this area of SolMan, and help like this is really appreciated.

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hello Vivek,

      Could you share your opinion on the following scenario / use case:

      We use SAP PPM to setup 'support projects; Incident resolution & RFC implementation) for multiple divisions within our organization. Each division is assigned their own project in PPM within the bucket structure.

      In solution manager however there is one common project for change requests (support project).

      Business users create a change request transaction in Charm and upon approval of the change i need the task to be created (and assigned to resource) in PPM.

      I understand that at the time of writing this blog there wre limitations i.e., You cannot assign more than one SAP PPM project to a SAP Solution Manager project; but this is what i would need to be done in our current use case.

      Do you know if the limitation is still there or can you recommend another way of using this integration in our scenario?

      Thanks and regards,

      Zubair Naseer