In this Blog post I would like to explain

• How SAP Cloud ALM converts an Activate Roadmap into an actionable Task List
• How content is kept up to date
• Why use SAP Cloud ALM for using SAP Activate Roadmap content

Roadmap to Task List

You may be familiar with SAP Roadmap viewer. Its a great tool for viewing roadmaps published by SAP Activate but its a view only envioronment. You can not assign those tasks to people and you can not set status or track them . Also a real life Project needs to manage multiple other tasks related to staffing , infrastructure and other topics so the task list needs to be extended.

This is exactly what SAP Cloud ALM does. A subset of roadmaps published by SAP Activate are made available in SAP Cloud ALM. These Roadmaps are called templates in SAP Cloud ALM

When you select one of these Templates during Project creation, it gets converted into an actionable task list

How content is kept up to date

SAP Cloud ALM performs updates silently. Whenever SAP Activate releases a newer version of Roadmap content , SAP Cloud ALM ensures that the latest content is available to not only the new Projects but also the running Projects.

You can see that via visiting the Task History

What happens if an SAP Activate instruction is Out of Date

There can be situtations in which SAP Activate chooses to restructure information or delete some tasks from the methodology. In such cases when the content update happens in the background , certain tasks are marked in a special state called “Obsolete” . They can be seen by adding the “State” attribute in the filter criteria. The point to note is that status of the task is preserved. Only the status is set to obsolete

Obsolete tasks show with a special Prefix in task list.

Please note even if a task is set to Obsolete state by system , you can manually re-activate the task again.

What are the advantages of using SAP Cloud ALM

There are multiple advantages . Some of them are below

• You can assign tasks to teams , roles or persons and make it a working environment
• You can add comments to tasks
• You can break activate tasks into sub-tasks
• If you are using SAP Central Business configuration , you see the Project actiivties from CBC below Deliverables and tasks coming from Activate , mapped to Activate phases
• You can extend definition of phases by adding your own phases
• You can add custom tags to tasks so depict your working behaviour
• You can see the tasks in Gantt chart view , in addition to the list view
• You get lot of predefined analytical reports

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

Follow me for latest updates by clicking Jagmohan Singh Chawla . If you are looking for an overall concise piece of information , you can also buy the recently published book.