What’s Driving SAP Change Control’s Growing Importance in SAP DevOps? - Part I:

[Former Member]

One of the best formal DevOps definitions I’ve come across describes DevOps as “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale. Less formally, the article describes DevOps as "the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle".

Keeping rapidly changing SAP systems resilient across the service lifecycle requires both increased automation and trusted SAP change and release management and governance.

The DevOps concept mashes development and operations together into a single term. It’s a good concept, making DevOps both a philosophy and a set of automation tools rooted in agile development. SAP Dev and SAP Ops remain different disciplines involving different skills and cultures, but by working together they can deliver better software, deploy it faster and run it more smoothly.

Better applications deployed faster translate directly to business value, and explain why DevOps as a practice has grown so influential.

The challenge here, of course, is going from good concept to established practice. That’s where the right SAP Change Control Automation solution comes in, by providing a natural bond between the two sides of DevOps.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that different functions foster different cultural behaviors and processes. In the next post, I’ll look at why DevOps is both cultural and technical, and show how SAP Change Control can benefit an organization on multiple levels, delivering value that increases as it integrates and works tightly with other key ALM components.

In the rest of this series I’ll cover:

• The changing role of ITSM and how SAP Change Control as a key integration partner can significantly reduce your SAP outage window when planning changes;
• What process and testing integration stakeholders need from SAP Change Control and how Rev-Trac integrations with SAP’s Business Process Change Analyzer and HP Quality Center deliver value on many levels, including picking up defects earlier in the process; and
• In my final post, I’ll wrap up the series with a summary of the cultural considerations, business case and ROI of implementing a mature SAP change control solution as the logical bond or integration facilitator between SAP Dev and SAP Ops.