Introduction
SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects, project collaboration, formerly known as SAP Project Intelligence Network is a cloud application that can enable effective collaboration between various parties involved in the context of a project. It can be a capital project, professional services project, or even an IT project for that matter(Software development project). With increasing demand to release software more often via "Continuous Deployment" processes, there is a definite need to enable Agile software development by using the right set of tools to manage such IT projects.
Project collaboration can be used as an effective, lightweight tool for the execution/management of software development projects. You can do the following with it:
- Manage tasks/work items to be done
- Manage issues/bugs reported on the software being developed
- Manage the project schedule for various deliveries/releases of a project
- Manage documents pertaining to the project execution like Design, Requirement, Specification, Test case documents, and so on
- Monitor project execution
- Collaborate among various stakeholders in a software project
In this blog, let's take a hypothetical software development project and see how project collaboration can be used to execute it.
Project Setup
Demo scenario: A software development company "SuperQuasi software" wishes to manage and execute software projects for a cloud product Quasi Analytics. It releases a new software version every month.
Company administrator tasks
The IT company administrator from SuperQuasi needs to subscribe to project collaboration from SAP Business Technology Platform and enable access to its users.
- Purchase project collaboration app by following this link
- Subscribe to the project collaboration app in your subaccount in SAP BTP
- Enable access to the project collaboration app for your users by following this link
Project Administrator tasks
- Navigate to the project collaboration app
- Click on "My Projects" Tile
- Create a project with a suitable name by clicking on the "Create" button
- Example:
- Name: Quasi Analytics
- ID: QU_AN
- Navigate to the created project and see the details
- Example:
- Invite users from various roles
- Roles
- Project Administrators
- Product Owners
- Scrum Masters
- Developers
- Quality Experts
- Infrastructure and Operations Experts
- Click on "Manage Partners"
- Click on your IT company entry from the list
- Click on the "Add" button in the list UI
- Enter the details of the user to be invited
- Roles
- Create Groups
- Create groups with the names corresponding to the user roles mentioned above
- A list of groups based on the roles played are created
- Assign the respective users to the group
- Create groups with the names corresponding to the user roles mentioned above
- Assign project functions
- The various user groups can be configured to have permissions to perform various types of operations based on their roles
- Product Owners
- Scrum Masters
- Developers
- Quality Experts
- Infrastructure and Operations Experts
- Go to the project overview and from the drop-down "Project Settings", choose "Project Functions"
- The project functions UI opens
- Click on the add button and choose the group for which certain permissions/project functions need to be set
- Select the project functions to be assigned to the group
- An entry for the group and the corresponding permissions are shown in the UI
- The various user groups can be configured to have permissions to perform various types of operations based on their roles
Project Execution
Product Owner Tasks
- Create tasks to be executed for the upcoming sprint
- Assign a sprint in which it is to be executed by creating "tags" for each sprint and assigning them to the tasks
- Create/Update requirement documents by going to the document management app and creating folders and documents
- Link tasks to appropriate requirement documents
- Manage the information in the project in a structured way
Scrum master
- Perform sprint planning and assign the tasks to appropriate developers based on what they picked. Use the filter for tags and choose the appropriate sprint in order to filter tasks by the sprints.
- Conduct remote scrum call by launching the tasks dashboard from the icon on top of the tasks list table
- Check if any task is blocked/overdue and take appropriate actions
Developers
- Go through the assigned tasks, check the details and collaborate with the product owner/scrum master in case of issues.
- Create subtasks as and when necessary
- Go through the linked requirement documents
- Update the status of the tasks on a regular basis and put appropriate comments
Quality experts
- Perform regular testing of features developed and report issues
- Link the issues/bugs reported to the corresponding feature development tasks and assign them to appropriate developers
- Monitor the bug count and keep it under control
- Collaborate with developers to get issues resolved
Summary
- You would have learnt how project collaboration can be effectively used to manage
- Permissions assigned to users
- Software requirement documents
- Task creation, sprint assignment, and linking them to the requirements
- Issue management, monitoring, and linking them to the tasks they are related to
- Developer task identification, collaboration, and progress updates
- You are all set to start experiencing project collaboration to organize and execute your IT projects!
- I would like to encourage you to try it out and share your feedback/comments/questions in the comments section of the blog.
- Also, for any general queries w.r.t project collaboration, please post your questions in our community
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