Executing a HANA Cloud Portal Project in Agile-Scrum

[Former Member]

You don't really need a Gartner report to realise that the Business user's are increasing using mobile devices (tabs & iPhones) to access their data on the go. I wouldn't be surprised if they start using google glass in the coming months to drill down on their sales report. They will not be satisfied with ugly and slow applications which requires logging in a thousand times and waiting for millions of seconds for the data to pop up. They will expect their business tools to give them similar user experience which their favourite app from the app store gives. Investment in Hana Cloud portal is a necessary investment for an IT department that wants to keep up with time.

What does a HANA Portal Project look like? How is it executed? what exactly is delivered and what is the value created?

I don't expect to clarify everything here in one blog, and I do realise the challenges and nuances will be far beyond what can be conveyed through a diagram, but I had to start somewhere.

Let me hypothesize an Agile project where we want to develop a Business website which will act as a single entry point for all the customers and vendors for all their personalized applications, which are hosted on premise or on cloud.

The basic set ups and configurations required in the cloud platform will be performed in the foundation phase. This phase may last upto 2 to 3 sprints depending upon the complexity you want to achieve but ideally this phase should cover the very basic of setup to start working on the portal. The subsequent phases will involve creating and perfecting the portal solution. The composition of the scrum team will include standard roles like that of a product owner, Business Analyst, technical lead, scrum master and developers.

Lets see how it goes:

Foundation phase: To setup a new platform we need to perform some basics like, setting up user access mechanism, SSO, Federations etc. We also need to plan how the Entry point (The business Website) will look like- what components it will have, where the brand logo will be placed etc.

These basic set up will have to be completed in this Foundation Release, so that the UI developers and application developers can add and customize components/features to the base layout.

Subsequent Release: Once the platform is set, we will be in shape to build, or customize applications. We may now add additional components and features- incorporate a news widget, or a video component, or we may host a new application altogether.

[note: Creating a new application will require a separate skill-set on JAVA [based on the application to the deployed] and on platform set up, cloud connector etc…]

For further reading, refer:

SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Portal Service Learning Center - Product Overview