Consulting Director, Bluefin Solutions
Agile SAP in action: Project Santa – the view from the business owner
19 Nov 2010
Agile Methodology, Careers, Project Management & Methodology
On Monday we’re kicking off Project Santa. This is an ambitious internal project that will incorporate the use of various SAP technologies in order to drive business change. The timescales are pretty tight so we’ve decided to deliver this using agile methodology.
I’m the project sponsor and business owner and I’ll be blogging regularly throughout the process to give an inside view of the project in action.
Firstly, here’s a bit of background.
What business outcome are we trying to achieve?
This project is all about driving efficiencies in ways of working. The business objective is two-fold:
- To make the lives of our consultants, project managers and finance teams easier.
- To improve the accuracy and timeliness of the information we collect.
How are we going to measure the return on investment?
A series of KPIs are being defined upfront. We’ll measure project success on the improvement of these indicators.
So why did we decide to use agile methodology for this?
In order to determine if this approach was correct, we looked at some key questions:
- How open to agile methods is the client? As the business owner I want to get as much as possible from the resources and time available. Agile methodology seemed to me the logical choice.
- Does the client need a signed-off blueprint before development begins? The fixed point here is the timeframe and not the scope so we are happy to work with a flexible blueprint.
- How tight are the timescales? Very – only 8 weeks from kick-off to go-live.
- Can the project go-live in small releases or does it need to be big bang? Potentially small releases and we can tweak the requirements as we go along, i.e. move parts out of scope if they can’t be delivered.
- Is the team based in the same location? Yes.
- Is business resource full or part-time on the project? Part time but regularly available.
The answers to these questions made me feel comfortable that it was an ideal environment for an agile delivery.
So we have a desired business outcome and an agreed methodology. Next step is Monday’s kick-off meeting.
Can this project meet our business goals? Will it result in a good ROI? And does it feel to be the business owner for an agile SAP project? Watch this space for more....
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