Is your SAP Change and Release process fit for purpose?

As part of her ongoing efforts to get me healthier, my wife got me a Fitbit for Christmas.

She has recognized what deep down I already know and have been brushing under the carpet for ages, namely that over the last few years I have been spending more and more time sitting in front of computer screens and less and less time being physically active.

I was skeptical about it at first – but it is actually proving to be a really useful device.

Amongst lots of other stats, my new Fitbit tells me how many steps I have taken each day, and how many flights of stairs I have walked up – both fairly good measures of activity, and by extension, good health. The Fitbit sets a goal of 10000 steps a day but unfortunately, I am finding I only average around 5000.

Regardless of whether the target set by my Fitbit is not based on any hard medical evidence, it presumably cannot be good for me to only manage half of it on a normal day.

My dad died of a heart attack a couple of years ago at the age of 65, and guess what? He played football for Queens Park and Scotland amateurs into his late twenties.

He played golf almost every day. He did his first scuba dive a few months before he passed away. In short, he was a lot more physically active in his mid-sixties than I am at the moment in my *cough* late thirties.

Deep down I know I need to up my game and stop brushing the matter under the carpet.

Deep down, I also think that quite a few of the SAP users we come across here at Basis Technologies are guilty of the exact same thing.

Adopting DevOps for SAP

We get a lot of inquiries from companies interested in ActiveControl and our wider DevOps tools.

They come to us because they are having specific problems in their SAP change delivery, and then through a lack of time, or because they prioritize other things, or whatever other reason, they put off the purchase of a toolset that would not only address their immediate problem but also significantly improve their general ability to deliver SAP change in a safe and timely manner.

For every few new customers that sign up for ActiveControl, there is always one that goes through our initial pre-sales process and loves the product but then disappears off the radar for a few months (and in some cases years).

They inevitably resurface when their original issue recurs or they start facing additional problems (which in many cases could also have been avoided by using ActiveControl to automate their change management processes).

And so these SAP customers get back in contact with us, they go through the sales process again, and this time they buy our toolset, ironically often for significantly less than the cost of the problems they face have been facing in the interim. All because they didn’t make time to sort the issue out first time around.

Sound familiar?

If so, why not make it part of your goals for 2016 to improve the health of your SAP change delivery processes? Taking a few minutes to check out our Devops Toolset is probably a good place to start.