Urgent Change Request in Quality Gate Management in SP10
There has been a significant improvement in the Quality Gate Management area in SP10 which did not make it to headlines as other features did. In SP10, QGM has been armed with Urgent Change concept and I took time today to explore this new feature. As we all aware Urgent Change has been part of ChaRM framework since long time and now in SP10 we can use this feature in QGM also.
What does this mean to Projects?
Earlier in the QGM we had only one type of Change Request which is “QGM Change Request”. The movement or TRs inside a Change Request was strictly governed by the Milestone or Q Gates. But there were scenarios where, if you used QGM for a maintenance projects then if something had to be fixed in Production at the earliest, then it has to wait till the all the Q gates are passed. But in SP10, you need not wait untill all Q gates are passed, “if something needs to be fixed in Production urgently then it will be fixed urgently”
How does Urgent Change in QGM work in SP10?
In the QGM projects while creating a Change Request, you get an option to create a Change Request of type “Urgent Change” as shown below;
Once the Urgent Change Request is created it will be in a status “To be Approved”. This needs to be approved by the Quality Manager and Quality Advisory Board. Once approved, now you can create a Transport Request under this Urgent Change Request.
The Urgent Change Request and Transport Request can be imported into Production system even if Q Gates/Milestones leading to Production system are in stage “Initial”.
In above example , if I had tried to import a normal QGM Change Request and its TR to Quality/PreProd/Prod then I would get the following error;
However Urgent Change Request would sail pass this barricade smoothly and correction would be imported into Production system on priority.
Can we make use of Urgent Change Request in existing project after upgrade to SP10?
I tested this part and got to know that you can not make use of Urgent Change Requests in already running QGM Projects soon after upgrade to SP10. If you create a new QGM project in SP10 then this feature would be available by default.
Existing QGM Project would continue to have following option
New QGM Projects
Cheers,
Vivek
Hi Vivek,
Nice that you mentioned improvements in QGM. We see many info about ChaRM but very few about Quality Gate Management, and exactly because of that I have a draft of a blog with this and other improvements that I noticed while working with QGM in SP10 last month. I will post it too as soon as possible and mention this one.
Best regards,
Raquel
Good job!
Thanks for sharing, it is good to know that QGM now also have UC changes.
This make sense to use it for maintenance.
Will definatly use this feature.
Hello guys,
Nice hearing about that functionality.
I have a question, I tried at a customer to use Quality Gates, and the did not like the "lack" of controls in working with modifications and transports. Customer was worried that someone can create a modification and then someone else can modify that modification, creating new transport requests, attaching and detaching transport requests, and some other activities
I did a thorough research and there were no way that you can restrict what a user is allowed to do regarding a modification. Though you are the responsible person, you cannot prevent someone else working in that modification.
I explained to that customer that the purpose of Quality Gates was a simpler and easier to implement Change Management functionality, without going into ChaRM for implementation projects, that even those small drawbacks was a much better situation than no using any Change Management tool (except for the excel sheet).
What is your opinion on that?
Regards
Esteban
Hi Esteban,
When it comes to security concerns, QGM has the all necessary tools to tackle it. SAP has provided all different type of Roles that you can assign it to users inorder to control the authorizations in QGM setup. With the right roles and authorizations we can achieve it. Some of the Roles are shown below:
We currently run a Productive QGM setup for our greenfield implementation project with 200+ active users in QGM setup. We have customized Roles and Authorizations for Team Leads, Consultants/Developers/ Basis Guys/Project Manager etc. We are not seeing even a single security or overstepping incidents in our setup.So it is a matter of enforcing the correct security measures than a lack of functionality in QGM.
With the new improvements in SP10, QGM is becoming a preferred Change Control mechanism for large implementation projects. You may also go through this blog to know more on the SP10 features. QGM improvements with Solution Manager 7.1 SP10
Regards,
Vivek
Hi Vivek,
It is very good to hear from you that big projects are using Quality Gates as preferred tool for Change Management. I am definitely in favor of that position.
I will go into the details of those roles to check whether we will be able to check to which changes you can access to.
Many thanks.
Esteban Hartzstein
HI Vivek
Could you please assist me with the below issue with patching from SP08 to SP10.
last week we patched Solution Manager from SP8 to SP10. After that initially there was an issue with QGM project status check, it was failing with TMS check in a logical component. There was SAP Note for the issue(SAP Note: 1878718). The Project status check issue was resolved.
But all the Transports in the project are missing ,from TX: SOLMAN_WORK center i can;t see any of the Transports in the Change requests that was created before patching the system and even it is not allowing me to create a new Transport Request.
what could be the reason for that missing of Transport from QGM Project.
i refreshed the project from TX:SOLAR_PROJECT_ADMIN, no use.
i can see that the Project is still active,not locked.even
consistency check is fine.All in Green
Kind Regards,
Phaneendra kakani