SAP Solution Manager 7.2 supports both Waterfall and Agile Deployment models. SAP provides a new methodology called SAP Activate which replaces the older ASAP and SAP Launch methodologies.
Long Story
ALM stands for Application Lifecycle Management, and it encompasses several phases (from Requirements, Design, Build and Test, Deploy, Maintenance to Optimization) and processes.
By successfully implementing ALM in an organization, new requirements can be properly monitored / controlled, documented, designed, built, tested and deployed smoothly into production systems as well as maintained and optimized to meet a business or legal requirement or due to strategic reasons without disrupting the businesses.
Sometimes customers fail implementing ALM because they usually ONLY rely on the best-of-breed software in the market. However, ALM is much more complex than choosing the right tool. It spans different areas such as organizations, tools and processes, hence the following factors must be considered when diving into an ALM implementation project:
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having an ALM owner and sponsor;
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defining an ALM project with effort, timeline (with Waves and Sprints) and deliverables with clear KPIs;
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defining roles and responsibilities (RACI matrix);
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staffing and upskilling ALM team (e.g. business process specialists, quality specialists, development team, testing team, change management team, release management team, …)
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defining an ALM maintenance strategy;
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and establishing a governance for ALM.
Besides that, other customers fail due to another reason. They are so keen to implement and take advantage of chosen ALM features and functions as quick as possible, and decide to setup and configure all of them at once. This strategy also leads to frustration, as most likely customers will not be able to implement them in time and achieve the expected outcomes due to lack of resource and/or budget.
Thus, it is recommended to define a clear implementation and maintenance strategy for ALM based on organizational requirements and criticality. Each ALM process may take several months to years to be fully implemented in an organization depending of its maturity level, and availability of time and budget.
There are dozens of ALM tools in the market such as SAP Solution Manager, HP ALM, IBM Rational, Atlassian Jira, among others, so it may be a challenge to decide which tools to use.
For customers running SAP solutions, Solution Manager 7.2 is the right choice as it offers an out-of-the-box integration among the available ALM capabilities.
This is very important to understand because information can flow without media breaks. It is not always possible to integrate different tools due to high costs or technical restrictions, hence data must be manually input which might lead to errors (human factors) or delays affecting the businesses and company profits. Even when a technical integration is possible, it may turn the technical scenario even more complex as it must be defined a master tool, a clear governance process to keep the information always in synch among the tools, and from technical perspective, adapters may not always work as expected.
Solution Manager is an SAP solution, complies with all the 15 ITIL processes, and offers integrated ALM capabilities out-of-the-box without additional license costs for customers with an SAP Enterprise Support or Premium Engagement contracts.
SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is general available as of August 2016, and covers all the following ALM processes:
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Requirements Management
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Portfolio and Project Management
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Custom Code Management
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Process Management
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Test Management (Test Suite)
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Change Control Management
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IT Service Management
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Application Operations
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Business Process Operations
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Data Volume Management
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Landscape Management
* It is important to highlight some features like PPM, ITSM and IT Infrastructure Management may have different usage rights.
Last but not least, it is worth to mention SAP Solution Manager 7.2 supports both Waterfall and Agile Deployment models. SAP provides a new methodology called SAP Activate which replaces the older ASAP and SAP Launch methodologies. SAP Activate was initially designed to support SAP S/4HANA implementation either On-Premise, On-Cloud or Hybrid environments. Nowadays it also covers other products like Business Suite and Solution Manager. SAP is constantly working on it to offer its customers variants of this methodology and cover other SAP solutions or approaches.
SAP Activate is based on 3 pillars. The methodology itself, best practices and guided configurations. With SAP Best Practices package, customers can jump-start the usage of Process Modelling and save a huge effort as standard business processes for SAP S/4HANA is ready to be imported. Guided Configurations will support customers to configure S/4HANA business processes and easily adapt them to meet customer’s requirements.