The road to upgrading your SAP environment leads you down many paths. How do you choose the best path to meet your business needs and service level agreements?
Every IT professional has heard about—or has first-hand experience with—upgrade projects that cost too much and take too long. And everyone knows that achieving the expected return on investment from an upgrade depends on the right planning and execution.
Here are five best practices—based on thousands of hours of HP Software and Services experience—that can help you execute effectively to get ROI and business results. Whether you’re upgrading your current environment or rolling out a new SAP system, these practices can help you achieve the level of quality you need to produce positive business outcomes, without excessive cost and risk.
Getting the latest version isn’t a reason for upgrading. Is agility your goal? Added capacity? New functionality? Once you’ve identified the desired outcomes, you can align IT project requirements with the business objectives. Mapping and traceability of requirements is important so that, if requirements change later in production, you can identify any associated impacts. Visibility into requirements and their relationships helps you apply your resources to the right tasks and make sure that all requirements are met.
Maximize resources through risk-based quality management. Identify the business impacts—intended and unintended—of each phase of your SAP upgrade. Use this information to prioritize testing and resource allocation based on the level of business risk each project presents. In addition to reducing risk, this helps align quality management activities with business priorities.
Manual testing processes consume resources, slow down projects and yield inconsistent results. A holistic approach that automates testing across domains decreases redundant work, lets teams share data and makes it possible to accurately measure the business results of your SAP upgrade. Automate every aspect of testing you can—test scenario and script creation, load testing, performance monitoring, diagnosis—then share automation tools across projects and organizations.
Accurately emulate production conditions to see how applications will perform under load. Testing software that simulates real conditions lets teams stress applications from end to end, applying consistent, measurable, repeatable loads. Use the data to identify and resolve scalability issues that could impact users’ experience.
No matter how much experience your IT staff has with SAP applications, they can benefit from the objective perspective of expert consultants who have worked with SAP technology on many upgrades across a range of industries.
HP supplies a comprehensive set of solutions and services that enable you to apply these best practices and take a methodical, successful approach to QM in SAP upgrades. For more information, visit the HP for SAP Web site.
