Implementing SAP Change Management

We are glad to have won a new contract to implement SAP Solution Manager - Change Management, Monitoring, 3rd party integration with Remedy and training for this major aluminium corporation.

Implementation of Change Management has started 2 days ago and we will post here the progress and main activities and steps for anyone interested.

Implementation begun on 13/12/2009 with a meeting with the key Basis Consultants and the Project Director. In that meeting we discussed the key topics and made some initial decision to move ahead:
- Pilot system will be a BI, which will be ready for go-live within a week, remaining ABAP-systems (ECC, SCM, APO) to follow one week later
- Initially, release cycles will not be strictly applied, but 2-3 times a week changes will be set live
- The roles of Change Manager and Test Lead will have to be assigned. The Change Manager often comes from a non-SAP, even non-IT background and could very well be directly from the business organization
- The main concern was the changed approach with regards to "buggy" transports - so far, these have not been transported all the way to Production, if a bug has been identified in QA. Many companies do this and of course this always leads almost immediately to problems keeping Production and QA in synch. Therefore, utilizing Solution Manager Change Management, it is mandatory that every transport, which ever makes it into QA, also goes to Production. As all transports of one change request are bundled together, the "buggy" transport will be overwritten in Production immediately thereafter with the correct transport. That way, QA and Production systems will always be in synch, but it does mean a change in approach for many.

Today, on 14/12/2009, we had a small kick-off meeting, where details, processes, scope and plan was communicated to the stakeholders and teams, presenting and answering any questions. The main concern was with regards to before mentioned QA-Production transports, but for now the solution seem to be accepted, pending proof of being usable. But we have done this at quite a number of customers by now, so no problems are expected.

Also we started today to review and approach the basis technical setup of the satellite systems in the landscape. First step, and always to some extend painful, is the setup of all the RFC connections. If you use the wizard in SMSY - it is almost always causing issues, so all connections have to be checked carefully. I have, seriously, never seen a Solution Manager, where initially all RFC-connections where working correct. So we started this and also at the same time updating the users, roles and authorization in the development systems. Actually, you will need to update:
- DEV/Development client
- QA/000, where TMSADM needs additional authorizations
- QA
- Production/000
- Production
So for each client, it is between 2-4 RFC's, so for one satellite installation with DEV, QA and PRD, you will have about 18 RFC's and users to setup and check. So at this client in an rather smallish landscape we look at a total of about 70-80 RFC's and related users to maintain. Quite a pain and usually always causing problems at one point - expiring passwords, etc...

We will update this soon, so you are welcome to check back,

Frank