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From the CEO
Welcome to our second SAP Change Control eNewsletter for 2009.
Business without life is meaningless, so we would like to take this opportunity to discuss two incidents that have recently touched the team here at RSC.
This month Paul Hayes, Rev-Trac consultant, passed away quite suddenly. I want to acknowledge the contribution Paul has made to the success of RSC through the many successful Rev-Trac installations he performed over recent years.
Paul earned a reputation of being thorough, very professional and was very well respected. He will be greatly missed by many.
The devastation left by the recent Victorian bushfires, during which over 200 people perished and more than 3000 homes were destroyed, also reminds us of the fleeting nature of life and that balance and perspective is important.
In this SAP Change Control eNewsletter we bring you some tips on change control workflow design and highlight an upcoming support initiative called GlobalView.
Registrations are now open for our next webinar, A simple approach to effective SAP technical change control process design, on March 4th. Information and registration can be found on the RSC website.
As always, we continue to lead innovation in SAP change control, developing software technology to help you reduce the risks and lower the costs of introducing changes into your SAP systems.
David Drake, CEO and Founder
Keeping things moving – designing effective workflow
The main purpose of workflow is, as the name suggests, maintaining a steady flow of work. It is a communications tool to ensure that those who are required to take action, or know when an action has been completed, are informed at the appropriate time in order to keep things moving.
Workflow in the context of change management informs change team members of process status changes and of actions required such as development, testing, and approvals.
Ideally, the workflow should be targeted – or highly controlled. That is, only relevant team members should receive workflow alerts, rather than all alerts going to all members.
High control workflow, or extremely targeted workflow, is difficult to design and difficult to administer, particularly if managed manually.
The alternative is a low control workflow approach. Low control workflow, or open and untargeted workflow, ties up too many people with too much information and risks a 'no action' result.
There are potentially high costs in either method and so workflow design should be aiming for an appropriate balance between information overload and administrative effort.
Five key workflow design tips:
- Decide the statuses each change must pass through
- Decide at which status points a workflow alert is required (approved for work, development complete, testing complete, etc.)
- Decide who should receive the workflow alert (developer, approver, tester, etc.)
- Decide who else should be kept informed (team leader, business user)
- Decide how the workflow will be triggered (manually, automated)
Careful preparation will reduce the costs of managing your change control workflow.
GlobalView – a new initiative from RSC support
Rev-Trac contains a wealth of configuration and usage information that, although easily collected and extremely valuable, is not easily seen.
With more and more Rev-Trac customers using Rev-Trac to manage change across very large and increasingly complex SAP environments, RSC has seen that Rev-Trac customers could benefit from a global view of how Rev-Trac is configured, how it is being utilized and who in the organization is using it.
With this goal in mind, RSC support will be releasing Rev-Trac GlobalView later in this quarter.
Briefly, GlobalView allows Rev-Trac customers to analyze their
Rev-Trac systems via a portal on the xrsc.com Support Website and includes a series of analysis areas providing extensive visibility via a dashboard. These include:
- A process viewer which generates interactive flow charts of all Rev-Trac change control processes, providing users with instant graphical visibility into their configured processes
- A feature usage analysis showing which Rev-Trac features are in use and, more importantly, which are not and how to activate them
- A system health analysis that identifies any configuration problem areas and provides advice on appropriate resolutions
- An interactive landscape diagram visually depicting users' own system and landscape details
- An organization viewer which shows the users' organizational and team structures, and each team member's approval level
- A range of usage statistics providing an instant view of the number of transports managed, number of transport migrations, number of signatures received, number of change requests, documents attached, and so on, enabling users to very quickly ascertain their Rev-Trac ROI.
GlobalView will be included as part of Rev-Trac annual support and will be generally available in the April/May 2009 time frame, but in the meantime, if your company would like to be part of the beta program please let us know by contacting us.
Rev-Trac Tips and Tricks
Rev-Trac transport 'Sent Indicators'
A Rev-Trac sent indicator is a small tag added to a transport upon the approval of a migration status, which indicates to which target group the transport has been sent.
- The sent indicator will remain in synchronization with the transport's current status in the migration queue and update accordingly
- When the transport has been sent to the queue the sent indicator will appear yellow (in queue)
- When the transport leaves the migration queue the sent indicator will change to Green (sent)
A transport that has a sent indicator will not be re-queued if the migration status is approved again. In this case a customer must specifically re-queue the transports, either manually or from the Rev-Trac workbench via menu path:
Request > Re-queue transports
The tricky part is that the sent indicator will turn green (sent) if the transports are removed from the queue in any way (deletion, migration, etc.). As such, when a user is adding and removing transports from the migration queue, they will need to ensure that the sent indicators are updated accordingly.
To remove a sent indicator:
From the Rev-Trac workbench – Menu path:
Transports > Remove sent indicator
To add a sent indicator:
From the Rev-Trac console – Menu path:
Migration > Tools > Update sent indicators
For further information on sent indicators, see the Rev-Trac Administrator Guide available for download from the support area of the RSC website.
[ More tips >> ]
Rev-Trac Q & A
What is the difference between an OOPS 'overwrite' message and an OOPS 'overwrite foreign' message?
Rev-Trac's OOPS feature will trigger an overwrite message when you attempt to import a transport that will wipe out all or part of the contents of another, more recently released, transport that is already present in the system. If a transport is overwritten, the affected object is often not left in the intended state.
An 'overwrite foreign' however will only occur when you import a transport which will overwrite another transport that exists in the target system, but does not exist in the source (development) system.
Although cases vary from site to site, often the overwriting of a transport which does not exist in the development environment will need to occur to ensure that the change can be effective in the production system. For this very reason, there are several ways that OOPS 'overwrite foreign' messages can be bypassed (if found to be appropriate).
If you are experiencing OOPS 'overwrite foreign' messages, please feel free to contact the Rev-Trac support team, to discuss whether there is an appropriate solution – support@xrsc.com.
For further information on OOPS messages, please consult the
Rev-Trac Administrator Guide, which can be downloaded from the support area of the RSC website.
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