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Those who’ve managed upgrades of any kind know that it’s never easy. It’s a good idea to listen to lessons that someone else has had to figure out the hard way. Focusing on the following areas can help you get the most out of a consolidation or upgrade:
Metrics: Focus on collecting and boosting the metrics that are most important to your organisation.
Make sure you document the baseline, pre-upgrade metrics, and that you can collect the statistics that you’ll need, particularly if you’re doing a pilot portion in one part of the organisation first. You’ll need those numbers to justify a more general roll out, as well as to fine-tune the system over time.
Options: You might have more options than you think.
“Companies have lots of programs that make it easier to make transitions from one server to another, such as loaners, parallel running during phase-in and consulting services,” says Jean Bozman, IDC research vice president for enterprise systems. HP, for example, has many different service packages, from technical upgrades designed to speed up existing systems to full functional upgrades that can help companies take advantage of the latest SAP features.
Services: Look for a services provider who can help with all aspects of SAP consolidation or upgrading, including servers, software, testing and related hardware.
“Services can help with change management issues and the aftermath of implementation. A company’s services partner needs to help them beginning to end,” says Albert Pang, director of enterprise applications research for IDC.
Testing: Make sure you build in plenty of time to test and build confidence in the final system.
“Thorough testing is important,” says Bozman. “You can also run new software versions in parallel for a few months.” Also, consider using reference architectures – tested, recommended configurations of hardware and software – as your guide. “In many cases, having reference architectures helps avoid surprises along the way, because someone has already done a lot of testing and tuning. It means you can climb the learning curve more quickly,” says Bozman. Choosing the right testing tools is also important. A major part of most upgrade projects – typically 20 percent to 40 percent of time and cost – is spent just to get the business processes working as expected. HP Software provides several products to help mitigate this risk, such as HP Quality Center and HP Performance Center, which provide traceability of requirements coverage and accelerate testing by using business process components.
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