Moving a Giant ! Project Management the SAP way.
The Giant
ERP implementation projects have being the a major pipe of investments on the IT business for a very long time.
The SAP ERP is the leading solution in this market and in a way or another most IT professionals were impacted by these projects.
Despite all that buzz I have seen many confusion and lack of understanding of management and project managers involved on how this kind of project is conducted.
First of all anyone involved in such endeavor must understand the reasons way a company decide to implement such a solution. The decision process involved in such a decision is not simple and in most of cases stretches for a long period until the final decision is taken. The figures involved typically are from some millions of US$.
Such important investment from any company must be preserved and maximized and for that the Project Management approach is a critical factor.
The Methodology
SAP released on January 2009 the version 3.9 of its methodology called AcceleratedSAP or ASAP (the acronym is also a very good catch to “as soon as possible”) 
That methodology is strongly based on the PMBOK following a roadmap composed by 5 phases stated in the ASAP Roadmap:
- Project Preparation The project is formally initiated, and planning is well under way.
- Business Blueprint
Requirements gathering and conceptual design of the solution. - Realization
Solution is built and tested; performance tests are planned; - Final Preparation
End users are trained; final check of the solution; cutover activities are carried to the new system solution.
- Go Live and Support
The solution is ready to start operations, handover to ongoing support takes place, and the project closing process runs.
The roadmap also describes each phase detailing, inputs, outputs, templates and accelerators as well Global Delivery Considerations.
It is very important also to notice that there are different types of SAP Projects, the most common types are:
- Implementation Projects
- Roll-out Projects
- Archiving Projects
- Migration or Upgrade projects
In next posts I am going to detail each phase. Stay tuned !
Useful resources
ASAP Roadmap – requires SAP Partner ID
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Did you ever do a follow up to this article? I have a client, big into PMI, implementing SAP and they are being required by the integrater to use ASAP. One of the Project leads requested me to find out a way to implement a single project management methodology that would encompass the principles of SAP’s Accelerated SAP (ASAP) methodology and the Project Management Body of Knowledge. Can you point me in the right direction?
Thanks,
Gary
Hi Gary ! I certainly do follow this up !
The ASAP methodology is already built in over the PMBok processes.
For instance, the Planning processes of PMBok takes place on the Phase 1 (Project Preparation) with the construction on documents like the Business Case, Project Charter, Project Management Plan and so on. There is room in the ASAP Methodology to start each phase with additional planning.
I think that the first action you could do is to depict the 42 PMBok Processes along to the ASAP Methodology. That would be a nice start to cross-reference both approaches.
I hope it helped you. Keep in touch Ok ?
kind regards,
Leo