With his tireless efforts, Christopher Salis has established himself as a prominent name in the technology sector. During his time at SAP, he assisted in the commercialization of the digital business unit and reduced the average time to market for new developments from 12 months to 90 days. Creating a strategic plan to reposition select zero-revenue products through low-touch channels was another impressive achievement during his two years as Global Vice President and Head of Portfolio Go to Market. As a result, a small portfolio of products went from zero to several million ARR.
5 Tips From Christopher Salis to Improve SAP Implementation
1. SAP Implementation as Your Business Change Plan
SAP implementation is a significant investment; consider it a business change program rather than just an IT project. Senior management must commit to leading and identifying business change initiatives such as global master data governance, sales, shared services, operations planning, and so on.
2. Define Your Business Case
Consider the business advantages of your SAP implementation initiative, as well as the benefit levers that can be used to make your transformation initiatives financially viable. Invest in creating and describing your business case so that you can reap the benefits throughout the lifecycle of your SAP project implementation.
3. Be Proactive and Anticipate Problems
An SAP project manager is responsible for more than just controlling costs and managing activities to ensure that everything is completed on time. He must be coordinated with the strategic approach and should tweak requirements if it will result in significant improvements. To recognize how their way of working will affect SAP implementation, one must follow up with project team members, stakeholders, and key users.
4. Preparation and Prerequisites
Create smaller work packages for the project’s scope, effort, and acceptance criteria, and define the iteration number and durations per work package. Define functional release/acceptance metrics for each work package and plan a handover session for multiple work packages.
The benefit of this preparation is that adaptation and changes can be made directly before the implementation of integration tests, which can focus on integration attributes rather than functional topics. Integration tests, go-live, and hyper-care phases will run more smoothly.
5. Waterfall vs. Agile Methodology
Traditional agile projects used a waterfall approach with unique sequential phases and emergency plans when things fell behind schedule. Most current SAP implementation projects, on the other hand, employ an agile methodology that comprises a set of sprints in which the design, build, and unit testing are all completed in discrete bursts. Scrums are held regularly to assess all issues, slippages are easily visible, and scope changes are easily accommodated.
For successful implementation, key dependencies must be ensured, and deliverables must be assigned to multiple sprints in a specific order.
About Chris Salis
Christopher Salis, an expert in the tech industry with over two decades of experience, can be reached through his official Linkedin profile. He has prioritized productivity in every company he has worked for. Apart from multinational corporations, Christopher Salis has used his insights to assist many startups and is a proponent of (GTD) Getting Things Done and lean startup philosophies.
