PHASE – PRE- PROJECT PLANNING
Pre-project Planning – Project charter creation. Included are Benefits, Scope, Methodology, Guidelines, high level plan, deliverables, milestones, team structure, RACI chart, Strategy and metrics for RICEFW documents and customization, conversion, testing, infrastructure, security, training change management, assumptions, constraints and conflicts.
Project Governance defined – Types of meetings, purpose of meetings, outcome, frequency, participants, team building and general meetings.
Project Organization defined – Stakeholder analysis, Team definition.
Budget – estimate amount of man-hours required per team and per month, amount of development and customization objects total per month.
PHASE – KICK OFF MEETING
Kick off meeting plan – Message from the CEO and or CIO, Introductions, team, Project purpose (why are we doing it?), scope, benefits, guidelines, timeline, next steps, Q&A.
Steering committee reports – Dashboard, data, high and critical risks, previous and future statuses.
Review lessons learned from last project
Hold a risk mitigation workshop with entire team – include risks in Project log and follow up weekly.
*Weekly Project status plan – MS project start and stop dates, resources, load level …etc.? Detailed Project plan for Realization phase from Blueprint document.
PHASE – BLUEPRINT
Is there a detailed Blueprint plan for each team?
Visio (AS –IS vs TO BE)?
Key business Requirements
Assumptions
Process Overview
Org charts
Master data elements
Business process design
Gaps
Integration points
Configuration requirements
Data migration plan
Reporting
Security and Authorization
Change management plan
*Project status meetings each week – Issues, risks, change requests, major milestones?
RICEFW Matrix defined – RICEFW means Reports (R), Interface (I), Conversion (C), Enhancements (E), Forms (F) and Workflow (W).
PHASE – BLUEPRINT SIGN OFF AND REALIZATION
Blueprint sign off.
Configuration and Development
Start Cut over plan – (Dev to QA, QA to PRE PRO…etc.?) team, planed start, stop, data loads, backups…etc.
Quality Assurance plan – capture compliance, deviations, preventive and corrective actions
PHASE – TESTING
Testing phase – Define SAP testing software to track and triage. Unit testing, Integration Testing, Security testing, Stress testing, Cut over testing and String testing. Regression testing.
PHASE – PRE PROD PLANNING
Define Change Management and Training plan – COMMUNICATE! define champions from executive level down. End user super users, org and Job changes, Security changes, Define training workshops, tools (SAP online?) participants.
Final Preparation – End user training, Job documents, cheat sheets, conference calls with Company management
Go or No Go decision
PHASE – GO LIVE
Go Live – Cutover plan execution with a quarterback. Authorizations to production environment in place, data uploads including master and transactional data.
PHASE – POST PRODUCTION SUPPORT
Post production support – production issues, (use triage) additional training, and documentation.
KEYS TO SUCCESS!
- Support from Executive committee!
- Be proactive, do not ever wait to execute tasks!
- Experienced project team members.
- Risk Mitigation workshop at beginning of project.
- Detailed Blueprint.
- Well written Functional and technical Specs for everything including configuration and data loads…etc!
- Proactive cut-over plan.
- Back up resources when required.
- Have fun!
Terry Vermeylen is a Senior Project Manager, Business Optimization expert, and SAP and Supply Chain specialist that has advised the US Navy, spoken at conferences, lost his soul a few times, and inspired teams to the point that they want to hug him.