Product Information
How to maintain Requirement and Task Relationships in SAP Cloud ALM
In this Blog post , I would like to explain
- The need to maintain Relationships for manually created content
- How to maintain Relationships via Gantt chart
- How to maintain Relationships via Excel Upload
Why we need relationships in Tasks/Requirements
We work in complex interconnected world. When a person is assigned some work in the form of a Project task or a user story , some of the valid questions are
- Should I wait for someone to start or can I start immediately
- Is someone else waiting for my work to finish
This is nothing but a predecessor and successor relationship. SAP Activate content comes already with these relationships maintained for Template tasks giving you a great sense of the logical sequence in which work must be done , but when you create content manually such as creation of Project tasks or User stories , you need to maintain these relationships
How to maintain relationship via Gantt chart
The first thing you need to know is that currently you can create or delete relationships for only manually created content mainly Project tasks and user stories. So before proceeding to creating relationships, you need to ensure that the right elements are selected.
Lets start with the example below
and let use assume I can not perform Task 2 before Task 1 is done and I can not perform user story 1 before Task 2 is done. Please note that I have maintained Start date and due dates so that tasks show in Gantt chart with appropriate duration.
So how should I maintain these relationships
Step1: Navigate to Gantt chart
Step 2: Select the first task
Step3: Drag the arrow from the first task to the next task
Note that relationship is created
You can continue this for the relationship between task 2 and user story 1
Now we can navigate to task 2 and verify that relationships have been created as expected
you can go to Gantt chart , select the head or tail of relationship arrow, do a right click and delete the relationship as well
How to maintain Relationships via Excel Upload
You can have an alternate approach when you mass upload or mass update tasks via Excel upload
when you upload the tasks via Excel Upload using the template . then
you then need to add a new Column called “Predecessor Row”
make sure that the Excel Row number for the predecessor is maintained in successor
Save the Excel and Upload it
Note: Mass update with Excel upload works only if you maintain manually created External ID in the Excel sheet from the first instance of uploading and keep them stable
Next steps
Stay tuned for more information. If you want to give feedback or have a question , feel free to drop a comment. Please bookmark these two links
- Master List for Blog posts in Project, Task and Requirement management
- Expert Portal for SAP Cloud ALM
You can also follow me by clicking Jagmohan Singh Chawla to get the latest updates
Great post, Jag. Thanks for sharing this with our users.
Just a small item to stress (you mention it in the beginning of the post) - the pre-delivered SAP Activate templates in SAP Cloud ALM come with the dependencies pre-defined from SAP. Customers have ability to build on that pre-delivered content. The initial effort in building them up is already done by us and the project team can only focus on adjusting where needed or for the new tasks that are added later.