Central Development Management

[former_member194818]

I would like to share some thoughts about a customer situation with the community to discuss an idea.

Current situation

The customer is the largest customer in Africa for SAP. All Business Releases are driven by their own agenda and the sync between all stakeholders is a little bit difficult.

The current system landscape contains the following setup

Production Fixes

• If a change is downgrading the target environment then it won’t be imported into the target system and it will
  be documented as a waiver change.
• If Double Maintenance change is needed to be adjusted into Project code after import, it will happen in Project
  environment (Dev1 or Dev2), depending upon the status of project.

Projects

• Releases being developed in two different development environments.
• The affected project can decide which retrofit will be done or not
• Retrofits causing constant development effort which also has an impact on testing
• No real freeze on development
• Dependencies are managed with REALTECH SyncAssist only by Double Maintenance

 

Risks

Double Maintenance is causing risks

• Non-transportable changes are not 100 % covered in this process. Those changes will be done in production but not
  completely in the project environment, this leads to inconsistencies
• The constant retrofit scenario is causing delays during testing
• Double Maintenance is working inside the projects as a sole entity
• Retrofits are not handled from the Business Releases directly
• Double development conflicts getting handled after the Business Release is in testing
• Fixing the symptom not the reason (Double Maintenance)
• High manual effort is causing high costs for double maintenance
• The projects can decide on their if they accept a retrofit from another project/ production

Initiative to solve

Double Maintenance becoming Central Development Management

Responsibilities

• Central entity controlling all transport requests from project up to production – Release Management
• Central Development Management is the bridge between projects and operations
• CDM is coordinating double developments for all objects of the entire landscape
• The developer from the Business Release/Project/Production Fix is responsible for the retrofit
• CDM keeps all CIT/SIT systems on the identical software level
• CDM is responsible to drive WPAP
• CDM create work packages and transport requests for all projects (according to WPAP)
• ChaRM should be the tool for CDM

WPAP = Work Package Assembly Practice

It is a methodology to structure development more efficiently

Benefits

• Single point of contact for transport requests and issues and release management
• Projects are still responsible for their planning
• Centralized work package delivery and tracking
• Centralized coordination of retrofits (until the single source development is ready)
• Centralized object lock management
• Avoid double development issues
• Cost reduced and more efficient cross system object handling
• No decision points for retrofits

SAP recommendation

Introduce a central entity or organization structure to control all transports and releases.

This team / group is the central interface between production and project world, to prevent silo developments.

Tools:
Solution Manager - Change Control Management

Release Management - IT Calendar

Responsibilities / Ownerships

What do think about the idea to centralize the transport and release management?My opinion is, that this is the best solution for larger companies.