Focused Solutions for SAP Solution Manager

This blog is about ‘Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager formerly known as “focused service solution requirements to deploy”. This solution delivers special innovations, avoiding custom code and less training cost. It is an integrated tool-supported methodology to manage requirements and software development in large, agile projects. The purpose of this solution is to meet the changing business demand and its requirements and to successfully deploy the solution in the productive environment.

Focused Solution is delivered via SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP13.

• No Coding Cost — SAP delivers a standard solution
• Significantly less training cost — SAP delivers all knowledge required
• No Upgrade risk — SAP delivers standard upgrades
• Prototypes replace traditional blueprinting
• Collaborate for solution delivery
• Automation of project work
• Solution Readiness Dashboard

The highlights of Focused Solution —

Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager

This provides an out of the box, integrated tool-supported methodology to manage requirements and software development in large, agile innovation projects like SAP S/4 HANA Implementations.

A) Requirements-to-Deploy

• Business Demand and Requirements Management
• Agile development management with remote factory integration
• Change and release automation

B) The Extended ALM RDS Services

• Enhanced features for change control management
• Simplified solution documentation
• Test Management dashboards and Improved test system refresh

C) IT Service Management Extensions

• Process improvements powered by HANA process and text mining
• IT Service Catalogue Management
• ITSM Best Practice pre-configurations
• Advanced Service Configuration Management with SAP ITSM

Focused Run for SAP Solution Manager

This provides improved solution operations in the run phase of a solution.

Dashboard Factory

• Customer ICC and OCC dashboards
• Pre-packaged models corresponding to typical Dashboards usages (OCC, SLR, etc..)

Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager

This provides dashboards, without the need for programming, to gain control and transparency for IT processes.

SAP Solution Manager has grown into the most mature and robust platform for the entire lifecycle of your solutions.It has become a de-facto standard, and offers powerful processes to cater to the needs of its customers.SAP Solution Manager is seen by analysts as one of the market leaders in strategy and execution.

Focused ITSM:

Improves your ITSM process based on text analysis and process mining on SAP HANA to structure, visualize and get insights on big data in ITSM. Runs IT services like a business, One can establish, industry standard and best practice process together with usability improvements plus  there is also configuration management with tight integration into IT services

Focused Solution helps in documenting target operating models end-to-end, identify gaps requiring major investment and prototype individual parts in early sprints, and automate project reporting based on percentage of completion.

Value for build teams:

Prototypes replace traditional blueprinting, collaborate for solution delivery, manage specifications and designs for requirements (WRICEF & gaps) in virtual project rooms and development factories, Manage agile development in waves and sprints, Automation of project work– Configuration automation via RDS, Transport automation Dev to QAS to PRD, Test planning automation for UAT and regression testing.

Value for Business and Discovery Teams:

Collaborate with the Business Capture, Scope what needs to be built, capture new business models, target operating models and requirements.

Value for Project Management Office (PMO):

Solution Readiness Dashboard as below.

Focused Build Project has five phases:

The five phases are Prepare, Scope, Build, Deploy and Run.

Many of the ongoing projects may have distinct timelines and outcomes. The phases of project will help respective team to organize their charter or work.

Build Phase: This phase constitutes releases. Release can be of two types —

Major Release — Major Releases are typically big releases which contain big changes to the solution

Minor Release — Minor Releases are usually processed in parallel to Major Releases.

In a release, you capture and aggregate all information relevant for developing and deploying the customer solution. A release is subdivided into waves and the waves will constitute of several sprints. In agile development, a sprint is a defined period of time during which software development has to provide deliverables for review. The backlog of a sprint is based on the prioritization of backlog items, i.e. work items.

When the customers are not happy with the outcome of the development then corrective measures have to be taken.These will include defect corrections, scope extension and/or scope change.

In the test phase, the testing of the release takes place. The content is finalized. This is the final release test, which means the entire package needs to be validated and tested for functional and technical correctness before the import into the Production environment.

Usually this involves a whole series of tests including

– Acceptance Test

– Regression Test

– Integration Test

Deploy Phase:

In the deploy phase, the technical steps to perform the cut-over into the production system need to be done. This includes all required preparation steps – technical as well as non-technical.

Work packages hold all information together which are related to one or multiple requirements.It tracks the status of the implementation overall –including the status of the individual work items. Work Package is available as a document type in the change management scenario. The need for work package is the Integration aspects which brings together planning, business content, scoping and execution.

The work package contains information about the related:

1. Business Scenario

2. Business Process

3. Process Step

The information about the planned release of the work package is taken over automatically, when creating an work package. They can also be assigned or changed later, as part of the change management process.

The program management office is primarily responsible in creating a project plan and tracking the projects in terms of resources, budget, timelines etc.. All changes in the project’s landscape is also reviewed. They sign off on the deliverable before being available to the business. The business team is focused on improving the business and provides requirements based on the gaps. The build team does the developments. They create work packages and assign the work items to the respective developers. They also unit test and document the ongoing work items in progress. The Test Management team is in charge of Integration tests. Defects are resolved in collaboration with the Build Team. Once User Acceptance testing is completed, the release management team then is responsible in releasing the changes to Production. The Focused Build Application has these defined roles with workflow as cited below.

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 comes with a fully managed solution documentation, requirements management, project management.

SAP Solution Manager solution documentation is a web-based documentation experience and contains processes assembled from re-usable libraries,processes are validated and optimized continuously based on real usage and integrated process experience. It is integrated to other ALM Scenarios.

Value added by methodology & tools

1. Automated visibility of solution readiness, integrated risk management

2. Business demand and requirements management

3. Full support for agile software engineering methods, best practice included

4. Collaboration across distributed development teams for global delivery

5. Automation of project work, as well as change & transport management

6. Compatible with existing solutions for run

More information and learning maps are available in SAP Support Portal/solutionmanager