Generally in your implementation project of SAP PPM, you have a critical milestone, the "migration of all your active projects". Like a guide of "How you can work to migrate to SAP PPM". This is my experience with users without knowledge of the SAP PPM. This not a whitepaper, this is a procedural document to perform your project migration to SAP PPM.
Key User: - What I have to do? What I may do? -
Consultant: - It's a simple question to a complicated answer.-
The migration of your active projects are the main core of all the implementation project of SAP PPM, and I have ten point of view in wich you will give me the reason to think that its important:
1. All the information that user need to view only exist in Projects to migrate. Therefore, it's very important that you should have the fields and the function in where to store this information. Try to use always the standard fields to support this information.
2. What user want to see in SAP PPM? Uncertainty exists when the user needs to see their reports, then we must make a plan to visualize the correct information. Check all the user's reports.
3. The Convertion rules are the bridge to know if it's applicable the scenary of project migration. You have to know that SAP PPM has the follow objects:
* Portfolios, Buckets, Initiatives, Items, Documents (Portfolio Management).
* Projects, Phases, Tasks, Checklists, CheckList Items, Documents (Project Management).
How to convert information into those objects?. Please use Convertion Rules and ask to your key users: How can we use this objects to reflect the correct information?
4. If you talk about fields or information, you need to talk about functions and business process. This is a good point. The migration of a project will take you to see all features available. It's natural.
5. Before customize SAP PPM, try to take advantage in all meetings to talk about migration. If you don't do this, maybe you will loose a lot of time to recover information over and over again. If you have a consultant to do migration, please include to him/her at the begining of the definition meetings. It's like the first law of any project implementation.
6. Don't forget the technicall thing. Don't loose your head in "How you make this technically?", you have to think in "How you can proceede to do this?". In all of migration projects the most dificult thing is to say to the users "please, give me the project information to migrate to SAP PPM", the user respond to you "what do you need?". It's very important that you have to know how can you proceede with the information to migrate to SAP PPM:
a. Talk to the technicall user.
b. Give and standard spreadsheet to complete with the information (understandable).
c. Migration not need to be transparent to the technical user. Share your convertion rules.
e. Talk to ABAP Programmers before and after see standard solution to migrate information to SAP PPM.
f. Avoid surprises.
7. Following with the previous point, please control the information that technicall user give you. Give responsability to the technicall user. Because you don't know what information you can find in the Legacy system, you will see a lot of garbage or fields in blanks.
8. Share information between Technical users and Key users. Because the extracted information have to be compared with the reality of legacy system.
9. If something new appears, try to include into the CutOver plan or makes changes to your programs (this would be happen). You would be have a list of CutOver things into the migration process. You will have it properly identified.
10. You need the approval of the information of project migrated to SAP PPM. Share the information of SAP PPM migrated with your key user to obtain this approval and compared with the reality of legacy system. That it's a good job. You will be very grateful.
I hope that this document has been relevant to you.
I wish you an sucessful migration.
Best regards.
Mariano
