Playbook for Remote Fit-to-standard Workshops

Over the past few weeks I had opportunity to work with SAP project teams and account teams supporting our customers to transition their project delivery from on-site (or mixed on/off-site) to full off-site delivery in matter of days. We have learned a lot and started to publish materials in SAP Activate that help our customers and partners benefit from our learnings. The very first asset we are making available immediately is Playbook for remote fit-to-standard workshops.

But let me start from the beginning. When I was approached by our project and account teams with question How SAP Activate helps our customers continue running projects as various countries implemented lockdowns and businesses overnight transitioned to working from home, I was confident that the guidance, governance, tools and accelerators support off-site project delivery. But there were two areas where I wasn’t completely sure if our guidance is strong enough for off-site or mixed execution. First area is the remote execution of fit-to-standard workshops in Explore phase that are traditionally run in on-site workshops with co-located participants; the second is performing cutover to production in Deploy phase during which most teams co-locate for execution of dress rehearsal as well as for productive cutover.

We started to work with my team and experienced consultants from SAP Services organization to formalize guidance for planning and execution of fit-to-standard workshops remotely in a playbook. The playbook complements the detailed guide for fit-to-standard we have in SAP Activate for many years and provides additional guidance for teams to prepare their environment for the workshops, sample agenda and explanation on how to use collaboration tools during the time when participants are attending the workshops from their homes. I was pleased this week to hear from our team delivering fit-to-standard workshops with customer that the playbook helped prepare and deliver the sessions successfully. Today we are making this playbook available to our customers and partners – you can download it here. Note that this version is designed for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and may need to be adjusted for on-premise projects where the tooling will be different – for example the delta requirements will be captured in SAP Solution Manager instead of the backlog template accelerator. We will be adding this playbook to SAP Activate methodology in SAP Roadmap Viewer in the next weeks, but I didn’t want to hold back this valuable asset that may help other projects stay on track.

The fit-to-standard playbook focuses not only on the functional and technical aspects of the workshop planning and execution, but also addresses topics of setting the right frame for running the workshops including how to keep the participants engaged, how to make the workshops collaborative by using tools and techniques to drive efficient execution. The playbook contains pulse checklists to help participants prepare for the workshop, sample agenda and in the execution actions the focus is set on topics of communication, attention, engagement and collaboration. Below is image of the entire playbook document.

During the work on the fit-to-standard playbook I learned about our consulting team’s successful execution of production cutover and post go-live activities with our customers. We held first calls to debrief on the lessons from these activities and we are currently putting together another playbook that details out recommendation for planning and executing cutover activities as well as guidance for the activities post go-live to ensure business adoption of the solution. We plan to release this asset soon in SAP Activate as well.

In addition to the purpose-built playbooks, our project delivery experts worked on a broader document that highlights areas that need additional attention during off-site project delivery with SAP Activate. We will be making this document available to our customers and partners on the SAP Activate JAM space (if you are not yet member, you can request invite at http://bit.ly/SAPActivate) in the next few days.

Please share your experience from delivering project work off-site or remotely in the comments to this blog post. If you have questions, post them in comments or send them to me and my team in the SAP Activate JAM.

I hope everybody has a healthy weekend and successful work week.