Going Live with Change Request Management CHaRM - with a Little Help from My Friends

[TammyPowlas]

Using several free resources, we have gone live with Change Request Management.  As a start, we took advantage of the Expert Guided Implementation (EGI) for Change Request Management.  This is free for Enterprise Support Customers.  I knew when the courses were available by reading james.pearce2 content.  He is good about announcing when the EGI's are available.

For EGI's you spend a week with an SAP expert going live with your own sandbox system.  The SAP lectures are 2 hours each day, and you are given a 50+ page PowerPoint each day with some "homework".  The key is actually spending the time after the lecture doing the homework.  You need to have your Solution Manager system open so if you have questions that can't be resolved by e-mail SAP can log on to it.

Source: SAP

I want to thank Shamantha for her expert help and support during the EGI.  I couldn't figure out how to make a field open for editing.  Shamantha researched this and got back to me with the help the next day.

The downside of the EGI is your SP in SolMan may not be the same that the EGI covers.  We are on SP12 and a few of the screens were different.

Next, we also took advantage of the Ramp-up Knowledge Transfer for Solution Manager, also free.  These are available at service.sap.com/rkt-solman with a Service Marketplace logon.  This is free as well.  We used the recordings available and the processes listed.  The downside is the recordings are not on the latest release of Solution Manager so the screens do not match up.

Using the RKT demos, we created our own swim lanes for request for change, normal change, and urgent change.

The above is our interpretation/flow of the request for change.

Above is our normal change "swim lane".

Next, we took advantage of the resources in the SAP Learning Hub (note this is with a Learning Hub subscription; Discovery edition is free).  The Learning Hub explained things a little more in depth than the EGI did.  Learning from courses like SM200 and End to End, we created a step by step process of what the swim lanes depicted.

This formed the basis for our test scripts:

For knowledge transfer to the Change Manager, Change Admin and Developers, I used UPerform to record processes like SOLAR_PROJECT_ADMIN which is used to create projects.  This helped form the basis for training documentation.

Testing showed more changes needed to be made.  This is where SCN helped, and by searching my issues on SCN that lead me to dolores.correa/content content which helped us figure out how to get e-mail working with Change Request Management.

I also attended an ASUG webcast given by a customer on their Change Request Management solution.  They had been live with it for 2 years and in those two years never had an urgent change.  I liked the idea of limiting urgent changes, if at all possible.

So a combination of EGI, Learning Hub, RKT, SCN and ASUG helped us go live with Change Request Management.  We "get by with a little help from our friends" - hat tip to Ringo Starr, who is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Do you have a Solution Manager story to tell?  Next week, ASUG call for sessions for SAP TechEd Las Vegas opens.  ASUG would welcome your submission.  See Plan Now for Call for ASUG Speakers for SAP TechEd Las Vegas