Managing Changes With Change Request Management

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Managing Changes With

Change Request Management

Whitepaper

Solution Management

Application Lifecycle Management SAP Active Global Support

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Table of Content

1 Introduction ... 3

2 Be flexible with changes ... 6

3 Control your changes & transports ... 8

4 Simplify your work ... 10

5 Gain transparency ... 12

6 Benefit from integration ... 14

7 Summary ... 15

8 Appendix ... 17

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1 Introduction

The ability to retrace changes is a key factor when it comes to ensuring quality and transparency in a software solution and observing IT standards, which is not easy to achieve without the right software tools. This is especially true for software changes and configuration changes. This document shows how SAP Solution Manager can help your organization to make changes traceable through clearly defined procedures and comprehensive documentation and also how you can centrally manage and control all your transports, better than any other tool on the market.

Requirements to Deploy

Figure 1 - Managing requirements, projects, changes and transports

All changes in a company have their origin most likely in the business. Either by having an en- tirely new request, to support the growth of the company or due to changed business environments and parameters. Another origin for demands of changes are incidents, that occur during the daily business and making it necessary to adjust the technical parameters of the software solution or IT components.

All those business driven changes will lead to new requirements, which will later be included in a project portfolio or will lead to a “Request for Change” – in case only a small change is required, which will only have a minor impact to the IT and the business.

The change control tools of SAP support the managing, executing and documenting of all those changes, requirements and change requests – not only by tracking status information and managing documents, but also by giving customers the right tools to integrate their IT closer with the business, which demands services and support from them. This integration also means that the tool is able to support the lifecycle of a change from the first requirement, until the final deployment in the system. This is possible through the tight integration between SAP Solution Manag- er and the different types of managed systems that are connected, as well as the tight integra-

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Page 4 of 20 tion inside the change control toolset of SAP itself – from the process level down to the technical level (e.g. by integrating the change and transport system directly).

In general SAP differentiates between several types of changes – based on the time that is needed before the change is realized and deployed to the productive environment. As you can see in Error! Reference source not found. – the biggest category is called “Major Release”, which might be an implementation project, lasting between three to six months and has its origin in a new business requirement. Besides that there are Minor release, regular change and emer- gency change, which all are either originated from an incident or from a smaller business requirement, to support the ongoing advancement of the business. Those types are usually managed through “Request for Changes”.

Inside of the IT organization the changes are either managed through an implementation project, especially set up to fulfill certain requirements, or through an maintenance project or maintenance cycle which supports ongoing changes in the system that are necessary to guarantee the performance and success of the business processes. This maintenance cycle and also the implementation project are divided into different phases to better support the management of the project and to control the release and the deployment. A detailed description can be found later in this document.

SAP Quality Gate Management can be used in combination with Change Request Management in order to control the phases of an implementation project. It ensures that certain quality criteria and project standards have been fulfilled before a project is switched into the next phase. SAP Quality Gate Management is a separate Change Control tool. It can be used as a standalone tool or in combination with Change Request Management.

Both tools are integrated with the underlying transport infrastructure of the Enhance Change and Transport System (CTS+), making it possible to track changes all the way from the business to the IT. No need to manually control transport requests – everything is handled directly from Change Request Management.

With this document we want to give an overview about Change Request Management of SAP Solution Manager, show you the unique selling points of the solution and highlight the features which make Change Request Management the best choice for your company.

Change Request Management in detail

Change Request Management is a flexible tool which supports you by controlling your developments and changes in your entire system landscape, centrally with SAP Solution Manager.

For this reason Change Request Management provides a lot of features and functionalities to you, please also note the feature list at the end of this document.

Within the change documents of Change Request Management, you have several possibilities, e.g. an approval workflow, which you can tailor to meet your requirements, and document any activities performed while a change is being implemented, from the initial request through to its technical realization. As a result, your organization can always trace where a request came from, who implemented it, and when the change was imported into a production environment. A key aspect of this approach is that all the relevant information is available in a central location and can be accessed at any time.

Providing a holistic Release Management

Change Request Management supports the management of releases in many ways. First, within an implementation project, you can plan any changes that are to be implemented over a certain period and monitor their implementation.

You can also document and resolve changes efficiently that are not part of a project plan but call for swift attention (urgent changes), for instance, if an error occurs that could jeopardize a production environment, by using maintenance projects of SAP Solution Manager together with

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Page 5 of 20 Change Request Management. This setup is very flexible, which means you can easily adapt and use it also for all types of changes that are necessary to be performed by your IT organization.

Furthermore, features like early or late-deployment of transports, downgrade protection and the possibility to re-assign transport dynamically to other projects or change documents will give you the ability to manage the releases of your software in detail.

Project plan

Another option to manage releases with Change Request Management is the integration to SAP’s project planning tool cProjects. Your organization can record and plan all the changes that need to be implemented in a project of cProjects project plan. You can plan resources and also establish a connection to the back end, for example, to the Cross-Application Time Sheet (CATS) component for recording activities. Change requests that have undergone the approval procedure can be scheduled here. The project plan is integrated in the project in SAP Solution Manager, which passes through several phases in what is known as a project cycle. The phases are controlled centrally from SAP Solution Manager and set forth basic conditions that cannot be sidestepped.

Integration of Change Request Management and Transport Management

In this regard, SAP Solution Manager closes a gap that exists in many other change management solutions: When databases or lists, for example, are used to depict change management processes and log change requests and approvals, manual intervention becomes absolutely necessary when a transport request needs to be created or imported. The transport request number has to be copied to the database by hand, which is a potential source of error. A typo or mistake when copying invalidates the entire process. With Change Request Management, transport requests are generated centrally from SAP Solution Manager and a reference to the corresponding change request is created automatically (with the ID and description copied to the transport request’s name), enabling a clear relationship to be identified at any time. The Change Request Management scenario lets you track all transports relating to a specific project, enabling you to check where they were created and in which systems they have been imported.

From SAP Solution Manager, you can navigate to the transport logs and import queue, as well as to the SAP Solution Manager maintenance project, the project plan, and the connected systems. This gives you a central source to manage and control your changes easily.

Support for all types of changes, even without transport link

Besides changes that require a transport request, you can also record changes in Change Re- quest Management that do not require transporting. As with all other changes, you produce a change request that goes through all the approval steps. You document the required steps in the change request itself. SAP Solution Manager therefore advances SAP’s vision of application management and IT governance by providing enterprises with indispensable functions for implementing and running solutions transparently. Transparency lies at the heart of many statutory regulations. It supplies answers to the question of who did what when, and who checked and approved the measures.

For an organization to run a system landscape smoothly in the face of constantly changing requirements, it must take into account the following aspects:

 Change requests, whether resulting from error messages or from idea management processes, must be classified and approved centrally.

 When a request has been approved, reliable procedures must be followed to apply the change, transport it to follow-on systems (quality assurance and production), and con- duct tests. These procedures should be complemented by meticulous documentation containing all change-related information and data on all persons involved in the process.

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 The status of a change request must be traceable at all times.

Integrated teams

Equally important is the integration of people within the organization, whereby SAP Solution Manager’s focus on processes is instrumental in enabling communication between business departments and IT administrators. Everyone involved in implementing a change can always access all the relevant information, such as requirements, specifications, documentation, test cases, test results, and status analyses, which are organized using the structures in SAP Solu- tion Manager and stored centrally.

Compliance

This offering from SAP is designed in line with the processes in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The ITIL defines the objective of change management as ensuring that changes are made economically and promptly with minimum risk. The Change Request Management scenario comprises the change administration, project management and change logistics processes.

Besides that Change Request Management enables your company to leverage those ITIL processes in a very easy way, by providing a predefined solution. Additionally, by providing tools for a central control of transports and enforcing user to use the change management processes for software development, it will support you by complying to audit requirements such as SOX (Sarbanes Oxley Act).

Ready out of the box

Another advantage of Change Request Management with SAP Solution Manager are the predefined standard processes and functionalities, that can be used instantly.

SAP Solution Manager comes with a preconfigured workflow for Request for Changes and change execution. These workflows are based on SAP’s best practice in the area of Change Control and Transport Management and leverage this knowledge, which has grown over time with influence of many customer projects. To enable a quick and smooth start, Change Request Management also comes with a set of predefined roles and authorizations. Those roles and processes can be used to easily enable the change management processes in your company and can later be used as a basis, when configuring Change Request Management to your company’s needs or adjusting your change management processes.

No additional license costs

As part of SAP Solution Manager, there is no additional license fee to be paid. SAP Solution Manager is part of your maintenance agreement with SAP and available for all types of maintenance contracts and all customers. Thus Change Request Management is not only helping you to manage your changes, but also helping you to save costs.

2 Be flexible with changes

All the functionalities of Change Request Management are highly flexible and adoptable to your company’s system setup and demands. Beginning by a huge support for different technologies and system landscapes, through to the design of workflows and custom processes. In this chap- ter we would like to highlight the flexibility of Change Request Management.

Support for all types of system landscapes

Change Request Management is as flexible as your business and supports many different types of system setups. Besides the de facto standard for an SAP landscape, which is the 3-tier system landscape, you can also manage more complex landscapes that include additional systems (e.g. pre-production systems) with Change Request Management. High complex landscapes

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Page 7 of 20 with four or even more systems can be configured to be included in the process flow of your change management processes. This also includes a more simple setup with only two systems (2-tier landscape), where testing is done on the development system.

Besides different n-tier landscapes, Change Request Management is also able to handle other system setups – such as multiple parallel test systems or the synchronization of multiple development systems (Retrofit). Also standalone or otherwise separated sandbox systems can be included in the process and adequately supplied with transports of your changes. In short: All transport route configurations that are supported by the SAP Transport Management System can also be supported by the Change Request Management.

Furthermore it is possible to enhance the system landscape dynamically in ongoing projects, e.g. by adding a Sandbox System or adding additional clients/systems for testing.

Ability to manage different technologies

Besides the ability to control all different system landscapes with Change Request Manage- ment, the functionalities are not only focused on SAP technologies such as ABAP.

Change Request Management allows you to control all your changes, no matter what kind of technology is used. Through the tight integration with the transport management system, especially CTS+ you are able to manage Non-ABAP and even non-SAP technologies such as JAVA, C++, Microsoft Share Point or other Microsoft .NET technologies.

Manage different types of changes (Flexibility)

Change Request Management is a tool which supports you in all change situations, and provides flexible workflows to guarantee a proper processing of all change cases. Like described in the former chapters, Change Request Management comes with predefined processes and workflows out of the box.

To support all those use cases, several transaction or change types are available in Change Request Management. The documents will be created as a follow-up document, based on the scope definition that has been done in the related Request for Change. The Change Request Management scenario supports four types of changes, enabling the change manager to classify Requests for change:

 Normal Correction

Requests for regular system maintenance activities, such as requests for Support Packages or SAP Notes to be imported. This type of change document can also be used in a implementation project.

 Urgent Correction

This change document is for urgent or preliminary changes or corrections, that need to be implemented as quickly as possible in the productive environment.

 Test Message

Reports errors discovered during testing to the development team. Allows the fix of bugs or defects in the test phase by creating an additional transport request. The developer can then correct the error at a later date using the defect correction, since it is not possible to create a new normal change during the test phase.

 Administrative Change

Concerns changes that do not require transporting, such as changes to number ranges.

The Change Request Management scenario therefore covers the complete life cycle, from ga- thering requirements to implementing, testing, running, and continuously improving a solution. It

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Page 8 of 20 is integrated in SAP Solution Manager’s extensive range of functions, which include Incident Management, E-Learning Management, and upgrade support.

Flexible Workflows

All the different types of change documents come with their own, unique and predefined process and workflow, which makes it easy to use them out of the box.

However – most companies have already established a change management process and do not want to change the process, because of a new software tool. Therefore all processes and workflows in Change Request Management are totally flexible and can be adapted to the demands of the customer.

This includes additional approval steps / procedures, and also the entire number and name of the process-steps that are required to create a Change Request or another Change Document.

Also the other change documents can configured and adapted, so in every case the right and best support for your change management is possible. Additionally every action can be controlled by defining own conditions, actions can be scheduled to run automatically and of course authorization checks can be easily included.

3 Control your changes & transports

One of the goals of a change management tool is to provide control mechanisms and functionalities to secure a smooth release of new software and updates. To achieve this Change Request Management of SAP Solution Manager provides a whole set of functionalities, that can help you in different situations to keep your changes consistent and limit the amount of incidents and issues, that occur during the process.

Built-in Transport best practices

One of the most important things is to keep track of the changes that go into your productive system and to control, which transport at all will be released from development over quality assurance into production. Besides that, the integrity of the related systems should not be com- promised in any way.

Change Request Management has built-in transport best practices, that will ease up the live of your system administrators and help you along the process, to avoid any issues when working with changes.

Transport of copies

One of the built-in functionalities for a normal change is the usage of Transport of copies (Test transports). This functionality will keep the original transport, and all objects in it, locked in the development system, until the transport and all its content was successfully tested in the quality assurance system.

This has two major advantages: First, all transports that usually are released from the development system will immediately be transported to the next ongoing system and written into the import buffer of the consolidation system. In case of cyclic testing, where the first couple of transports will not include the final developments, this will fill the import buffers unnecessarily.

By using transport of copies, only copies of the original transport are sent to the next ongoing system, without queuing the transport already at the productive system. Only once all tests are successful, finally the original transport will be released. As only the last version of an object is sent to production, this reduced the import time in production significantly. Second, instead of releasing a transport directly, which will unlock all objects in it and move the transport to the next system, transport of copies will not influence the original transport request. All objects will

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Page 9 of 20 stay locked in the development system, to show other developers that those objects are still in process.

Prevention of inconsistent transports

Daily business will make it necessary to combine normal and urgent changes together, on the same system landscape – even though new developments or regular maintenance is still ongoing. In case a object will be changed, which also is related by a new development this can lead to issues, when importing the transports in an incorrect order.

Change Request Management has built-in functionalities to secure the processing of all normal and urgent changes, by importing the transports always in the correct order. This prevents inconsistencies and overtaker problems. When you are later doing the project import, all related urgent corrections will be taken into account and imported again in the correct sequence.

Cross-System object lock

Imagine several different implementation or maintenance projects are ongoing in your systems.

Some of those projects are even working with the same system landscape. If a developer has now changed a certain object, which another developer is going to change later as well, all the changes from the first developer are lost. This issue can be solved by using the cross-system object lock.

The cross-system object lock ensures that when an object is changed in a managed system, a lock entry is created for this object in the central SAP Solution Manager system. Depending on the selected conflict analysis scenario, this lock entry prevents changes being made to this object in any other transport request. This applies to all managed systems and clients for which the cross-system lock has been activated. It does not only protect objects of the ABAP workbench, but also customizing settings.

This will help to minimize the risk of downgrades through different go-live dates of changes from different projects.

Downgrade protection

Another helpful feature, to control your changes is the downgrade protection¹ of SAP Solution Manager. When you are working in a flexible and always changing environment a lot of changes can occur in different projects and with different urgency.

With a first level of protection the Cross System Object lock can prevent you from making changes which can cause inconsistencies later. The downgrade protection of SAP Solution Manager Change Request management enhances this mechanism to also issue warnings or stop the process when actually releasing or importing a transport request into system. Informa- tion for all persons involved in decision making are present such as project information, change and user information down to the technical level of transports and objects causing possible inconsistencies. Of course a direct navigation to all these information is possible.

Finally the downgrade protection can make sure that no downgrade can occur and keep your test and production system consistent.

In case you are working with a flexible release management it is possible to keep your releases and their deployment consistent and therefore ensuring a more stable production environment.

In combination with the Cross System Object Lock Change Request Management offers you protection at all stages of a technical change, from actually doing the change via releasing it from the development environment to finally deploy it to production.

Changing transport assignments

When working in maintenance cycles that have different phases, it might be necessary to re- move single transport requests from this cycle or change the assignment of transports to a

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Page 10 of 20 change document, due to changing parameters from the business side or unfinished developments.

Change Request Management provides functionalities to change the assignment of transports¹, before the release of a project, giving you a maximum of flexibility with your releases and detailed control of transport requests.

Handling critical or sensitive objects

Before transport requests are exported, you can activate a check to determine whether they contain critical transport objects, which require approval before they can be transported. This check can be activated both on a system- and client-specific level. While a transport request is being exported, the target system and the target client are determined. If the transport object checks have been activated for the relevant client of the target system, the export program checks whether the transport request contains critical transport objects, or sub-objects of critical transport objects. The export does not take place if the transport request contains critical objects.

To transport such transport requests, the critical objects needs to be approved – allowing you to control which changes on sensitive technical objects, where a bug might have a serious impact on the core business processes, is possible.

Importing transports on demand

Instead of re-assigning a transport completely to another change document or project, it might also be necessary to import certain transports in advance or postpone the import completely.

This functionality is often also referred to as delay of transports, back out transports or early deployment of transports¹.

With Change Request Management you are able to speed up the deployment of a transport request, if necessary and switch it from a normal change into an urgent change. You can then release this change independent from the other changes that belong to a project.

When going live with a maintenance project, not all functionality might always be ready to be transported to the production system. Some parts of the software might be postponed to the next release. With Change Request Management you are able to leave out unfinished change documents when releasing your project. This gives you full control and flexibility for your release management.

Manage project phases

With the built-in phase control of SAP Solution Manager it is ensured that only allowed transport actions are performed always at the right point in time. With managing and controlling the phases of your maintenance or implementation projects you can make sure to keep a test system consistent during tests and not accidentally deploying changes to production.

The phase control is integrated with the different types of changes thus making sure that only right procedures are used in the different phases – e.g. the enforcements of Defect Corrections during the project test phase.

This functionality makes it easy to control all your different developments (implementation or maintenance projects) centrally from SAP Solution Manager.

4 Simplify your work

Change Request Management is not only a tool to give you more control over your change management, and providing you a high level of flexibility at the same time. It is also a tool which can simplify and speed up your daily work by providing automation functionalities.

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Page 11 of 20 Retrofitting of transports

When having bigger implementation or upgrade projects, SAP recommends using a dual or phased system landscape, to better differentiate between maintenance developments and new implementations.

Figure 2 - Dual System Landscape

Such a dual system landscape consists of a regular system landscape (e.g. 3-tier) and an additional project or implementation landscape (e.g. 2-tier). All maintenance activities can be done without any disruption through the implementation projects, which might be touching a lot of objects that are frequently used in the productive environment and that have a big demand for maintenance. On the other side, all the implementation efforts are independent from the main- tenace activities, making it easy to change the existing implementation and developing new functionality, without endangering the productive landscape.

However by using such a landscape all changes in the maintenance landscape must be manually re-implemented in the development landscape. This means additional manual effort. In addition, if the Retrofit process is not supported by a tool, there is a high risk that the Retrofit is not done completely. This leads to missing synchronization between the maintenance and development landscape and causes problems during the later cutover and GoLive.

The Retrofit tool in SAP Solution Manager automatically captures all changes in the maintenance landscape and transfers them into the development landscape. Depending on the situation different methods for the Retrofit are available:

 Auto import: If the workbench objects or customizing settings have only been changed in the maintenance landscape but not in the development landscape, the objects can be transferred automatically.

 Semi-automatic adjustments: If the workbench objects or customizing settings have been changed in the maintenance landscape and in the development landscape, semi- automatic adjustments are possible. For workbench objects the SAP Correction Work- bench is used to adjust the coding. This is similar to the implementation of an SAP Note. For customizing settings BC Sets can be used to compare and adjust the settings in the maintenance and development landscape.

 Manual adjustment: This is only needed in rare cases, if none of the above mentioned methods applies.

By introducing semi-automatic adjustment methods the Retrofit procedure in SAP Solution Manager achieves a higher automation level compared to other tools in the market.

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Page 12 of 20 The classification of transports and objects is done automatically by the system and gives you all the information you need and provides further functionalities such as system comparison for to be retrofitted objects and providing information of possible sequencing issues. Furthermore the retrofit process can be tightly integrated into the change workflows or operated centrally and independent from any change procedures.

This will save a significant amount of time, since no manual check of all transports that are released in the maintenance landscape is necessary any more. Experiences from various customers show that an automation rate of more than 90% can be reached.

Implementation Projects with Change Management / Simplified change control process When doing implementation projects, the approval workflow of Change Request Management might be slowing down the development process, since all change documents need to be approved before they can be created.

To overcome this issue, Change Request Management is built very flexible so you can use all the transport management and transport control functions also without the full blown workflow implementation. By directly creating change documents for certain implementation projects, you are able to benefit from all functions without losing anything.

5 Gain transparency

Change Request Management is not only a tool to control and manage your change processes and transports, it also provides detailed reporting and tracking functionalities, so you will never lose track of your transports and actions that are happening in the different system landscapes.

Due to the state of the art integration with the transport management system and the fact that the reporting functionalities are totally independent from BI systems, all reporting functionalities are available out of the box.

Reporting

As already mentioned in the first section, Change Request Management reporting comes out of the box. This means all queries and result lists are already predefined and can be leveraged instantly. When Change Request Management was activated to perform all system changes you will gain the big picture about all the changes with Change Request Management reporting.

Reporting is available with a combination across these four areas:

 Solution and Project Management

 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

 System Landscape Maintenance

 Transport Management System

Change Request Management events, such as changing an object in a development system or implementing an SAP Note in a system, are processed in the context of SAP Solution Manager solutions or projects. The events involved in a transaction are distributed across system landscapes and central management systems, and they require approval procedures and a clear assignment of tasks. The Change Request Management reporting function analyzes these transactions and their corresponding events in the relevant areas, summarizes them, and presents them in an overview. No BI setup or dedicated BI system is required to run these reports. A Change Request Management Reporting Service captures data automatically from both, the Solution Manager system and the relevant connected managed systems.

You can specify which types of data you want to display, and also specify additional filter criteria for retrieving the data. The result data is displayed in an ALV grid, where you have plenty of

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Page 13 of 20 active controls like navigating to the detailed view of CRM transactions, projects, or task lists. As well it’s possible to export the result data to a local file or a spreadsheet for further processing or graphical conditioning.

The Change Request Management reporting service allows you to select and display across:

 CRM change transactions

 SAP Solution Manager solutions and projects

 Change Request Management task lists

 Systems

 Support Packages

 SAP Notes

 Transport requests

 Transport objects

Tracking Changes

The tracking functionality will make it possible for you, to have the possibility to track all changes of one Solution Manager project very easily. A special overview screen contains all kind of different information, and allows further in-depth analysis.

As an example you can track for:

 Source system where transport requests were created

 Target system into which transport requests were imported

 Number of transport requests exported from target system

 Number of transport requests imported into to target system (applies to target system).

 Number of transport requests that were created but have not been released yet

 Number of transport requests that are waiting to be imported into the follow up system

 Number of transport requests that were imported with errors

On top of these tracking examples you can gain information whether or not change requests were imported in the correct sequence into the target system. Besides that, you can also find out whether or not there are inconsistencies in the content of the source and target systems, concerning the export and import of change request. You are also able to the check for differences inside of system landscapes (delta errors) which might occur due to transports being copied, or due to cross-system transports into the development system – this information can be very useful when tracing issues or making in-depth analysis.

Also you can track all actions (export or import, for example) that have been performed for a selected transport request, which also indicates in which systems the actions were performed.

Another function of the Change Request Management tracking is the comparison of two systems with each other, to check which transport requests have been imported or exported, or to find out the differences. First, you can display all records of each system is a split screen or second, imagine you want to see all deltas and find out which changes were exported from one system but were not imported into the follow-up system? In the Change Request Management tracking tool it’s just one click.

On top of this, a detailed import sequence analysis is available. You can see whether differences exist in the sequence in which changes were exported from one system and imported into another system. The system displays the number of sequence violations if existing. For further investigation you’ll get again active controls to directly navigate to relevant detailed data such as the full log of all actions performed for one Transport request.

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Page 14 of 20 As you can see, reporting and tracking functionalities of Change Request Management will provide you a set of tools which will allow you to analyze every piece which is part of your change management process, and even more.

6 Benefit from integration

As SAP Solution Manager does not only offer Change Management functionalities, but a whole set of other application lifecycle management capabilities, this is one of the biggest advantages of Change Request Management and the SAP Solution Manager.

Already today, there are a lot of integrations of Change Request Management with other ALM processes and more and even tighter integration is planned.

The SAP Solution Manager is the only platform in the market which combines application lifecycle functionalities together with other IT service management functionalities on a single platform, allowing you to benefit from this by having a change management tool, which is integrated with several other tools along the application lifecycle.

Quality gate control for changes

Besides the Change Request Management, also another tool is part of the change management in SAP Solution Manager: Quality gate management.

With quality gate management you are able to define quality gates on top of your maintenance or implementation projects and further control the phases of your project. After the sign-off of a quality gate, the project and all underlying transports can be switched to the next phase.

The quality gates are controlled by a Quality Manager and a Quality Advisory Board. They make sure that certain quality criteria and project standards are fulfilled, before a project is switched into the next phase.

This functionality is also integrated within Change Request Management. With the next release of SAP Solution Manager, customers will be able to use Change Request Management and Quality Gate Management together on the same project.

Figure 2 – Calendar View in SAP Quality Gate Management Integration to Solution Documentation and Solution Implementation

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Page 15 of 20 All changes in Change Request Management are always based on a maintenance, implementation or other SAP Solution Manager project. Besides that, the information inside these projects can also be referenced and used to classify and categorize changes in Change Request Man- agement.

You are able to assign project or solution information, such as business process steps, business processes or other structure nodes to a Request for Change or a change document.

When assigning a solution to a change document, you are able to use a functionality called

“Check-In and Check-Out”. Once you have activated this functionality together with Change Request Management, the structure and content of the solution cannot be edited directly any- more. Furthermore, parts of the solution structure that are subject to change, can be checked- out from the solution and imported into the related maintenance project. In this project the documents and processes can be updated, according to the software changes that have been made. Afterwards the documents can checked-in again, once the maintenance project is complete.

The result is not only updated software, but also an updated solution documentation, which is necessary for other application lifecycle management functionalities – such as business process monitoring.

Using test management with Change Request Management

When it comes to change management, one topic is always closely related: testing. SAP Solu- tion Manager also offers a huge set of functionalities and tools to manage the testing of the different systems in a customer landscape.

With the next release of SAP Solution Manager, those test management capabilities will be integrated with Change Request Management. Making it possible to assign test packages or test plans to a Request for Change or a change document. This will ease up the process of planning a test phase, and make the life of the test coordinator better.

Additionally to assigning test items and generating references it is possible to control the process of a change document. SAP prepared functionalities to check for successful test execution, before the status of a change document can be switched. This will force your testers and developers to execute the test cases until they are successful, which brings more stability to your software.

7 Summary

In today's distributed environments, comprehensive change control management plays a crucial role. With standardized processes, methods and tools, it ensures high transparency and conti- nuous quality of the change processes, during the entire application life cycle.

Change Request Management comes with a predefined set of workflows and processes, which are all compliant to the recommendations provided by the IT infrastructure library (ITIL). This will support you when trying to setup an ITIL compliant change management process in your company.

Change Request Management coordinates all changes in a software landscape, to ensure that changes do not conflict with each other. It also ensures that changes are made without disrupt- ing the ongoing business. This results in improved quality of the software landscape, higher availability of IT solutions, and lower total cost of ownership. Change Request Management ensures that the performed changes remain transparent and traceable.

Change request management enables you to manage your Solution Manager projects (maintenance, implementation, template, and upgrade) from end to end: starting with change man-

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The processes supported by change request management includes urgent corrections for implementing fast and direct changes in the productive environment, and activities for maintenance projects, and implementation, upgrade, and template projects. Cross-system and cross- component changes are supported and secure by sophisticated functionalities.

Change request management offers a lot of benefits, like ensuring a comprehensible documentation of planned and implemented changes and their consequences. By having a tight integration with the SAP transport management system, it guarantees a complete coverage of change requests to technical transports. This will also result in a consistent documentation of all change requests, which makes it easy to comply with compliance auditions.

By using this infrastructure and toolset the efficiency of change management projects will im- prove significantly. The usage of preconfigured workflows and holistic change processes will not only reduce the workload of IT specialists, but also minimize business disruptions – finally resulting in reduced costs.

This approach will help you to increase the transparency of your solution, make it easier to get an overview and help to achieve a higher quality of changes.

With Change Request Management, SAP delivers an end-to-end solution that comes with no additional license costs and that is already available on your SAP Solution Manager. Benefit from the tight integration in SAP’s Application Lifecycle Management and make Change Re- quest Management to the change management tool of your organization.

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8 Appendix

List of Features for Change Request Management with SAP Solution Manager

Install and Run

Runs on almost all SAP Solutions Minimum is SAP ERP 4.6C

Easy installation and user-training Common SAP environment, which most basis admins are used to and comfortable with.

No installation required, already installed with SAP Solution Manager - only short setup and configuration needed

Predefined change management processes

Change Request Management of SAP Solution Manager comes with predefined change management processes that run out-of-the-box without any setup or customizing effort Central system administration and

change control SAP Solution Manager is the central system management tool, which is able to control all SAP and non-SAP systems and is fully integrated with the applicaiton lifecycle management suite

Integration with Transport Manage- ment System and the enhanced change and transport system (CTS+)

Change Request Management is fully integrated with transport management and CTS+

functionality

Be flexible with your changes

Flexible and configurable user inter-

face Completely flexibel user interface, providing change possibilties on several layers: admin layer and personalization layer for a maximized user satisfaction

Support for all kind of system land-

scapes Change Request Management can be used in

every system landscape including complex landscapes such as Dual Phased Landscapes Control changes for SAP and Non-SAP

technologies

Due to the integration of TMS and CTS+, Change Request Management allows you to control and manage changes from all kind of technologies (ABAP, Java, C++, .NET, etc..) Differentiate between several change

types Differentiate between a set of different change categories: normal changes, urgent changes, administrative changes, etc...

All of them have their own process, which comes already preconfigured with Change Re- quest Management

Completely flexible and configurable process flow (including approval pro- cedures)

Based on the default processes and workflows, you can model and define your own processes with a very flexible framework

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system landscapes Change Request Management can easily be extended to support new system landscapes and projects - without additional setup effort

Control your changes &

transports

Enforce the usage of Change Request

Management processes Full enforcement of change request management on project or system level when activat- ing CHARM - independent of authorizations (even SAP_ALL is not working)

Create complete audit trail Change Request Management is compliant to all common audit processes

Control each transport centrally with

Change Request Management The usage of Change Request Management can be enforced that transport requests can only be created centrally with Change Request Management

Leverage SAP's transport best prac-

tices Change Request Management has built-in

transport best practices, that will ease up the live of your system administrators and help you along the process, to avoid any issues when working with changes.

Prevent inconsistent transports and

use transport of copies Change Request Management uses transport of copies to minimize transport risks and high- loads for import buffers of the ongoing systems.

Also it ensures that only sucessfully tested transports can ever end up in a flollow up system.

Segregation of duties Make sure to comply to "Segregation of duty"

regulations through software enforcement Overwrite protection (cross system

object lock) In case of multiple or parallel development projects, cross system object lock will check which objects have already been changed and are already part of an transport request. This will avoid overwrite situations

Avoid downgrades through automatic

downgrade protection Be informed about possible and imminent downgrades when exporting or importing a transport and get proposals for avoidance Be able to change transport assign-

ments Be flexible when defining your release-

packages and re-arrange transport or change document assignments when necessary Special handling of critical or sensitive

objects Enforce additional approval for senstive or critical objects, that are part of core business processes or require special attention

Import transports on demand Decide on demand which transports should be included in a release, when importing and releasing a project for production

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Page 19 of 20 Manage different project phases cen-

trally Control your projects centrally with Change Request Management, to define which actions are possible in which project phase

Built in consolidation All corrections that have been imported in advance to the GoLive of a project will be imported again with the project. With this automatic consolidation you'll always be protected from downgrades.

Ensure correct sequencing of trans-

ports Change Request Management automatically

does the correct sequencing of all relevant transports request for you

Simplify your work

Automated release and import of

transports (ABAP and Non-ABAP) The release and import of all transport requests are controlled and started centrally from Change Request Management Synchronize dual system landscapes

(Retrofit) Sophisticated "Retrofit" functionality with conflict and overwrite protection, nearly 100%

automation possible. Semi-automatic functionalities are available in case of conflict situations

Leverage transport control mechanism

in implementation projects Use a simplified process for implementation projects, to avoid time-consuming approvals of Request for Changes in an new implementation project (ChaRM lite)¹

Gain transparency

Detailed reporting functionalities Detailed reporting capabilities, to track status of documents, approvals and all other change- process relevant information

Transport tracking mechanisms Get information about the status and location of every transport in your system landscape Easy access to transport logs Be able to run in-depth analysis through easy

access to transport logs from reporting

Benefit from integration

Integration with Solution Directory Assign solutions, business processes and steps of the Solution Directory to your Change Re- quest Management documents.

Leverage check-in/check-out functionalities, to keep your business process documentation always up-to-date

Integration with Business Blueprint

(SOLAR01/02) Assign projects, business processes and steps from your SAP Solution Manager projects to your Change Request Management documents

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Page 20 of 20 Integration with cProjects Use Change Request Management together

with cProjects, and manage your projects and phases from cProjects

Integration with Test Management Assign testpackages and testplans to Request for Changes or other Change Documents of Change Request Management

Integration with Incident

Management Create Requests for Change directly from Inci- dent Management, according to ITIL, and benefit from automatic copy of context information

Integration with Quality Gate Man-

agement Use Quality Gate Management to control your releases and phases and Change Request Management for your approval processes and central transport control and management Impact analysis with Business Process

Change Analyzer (BPCA) Benefit from the fact that Change Request Management is built in into SAP's Application Lifecycle Management tool SAP Solution Man- ager.

Use Business Process Change Analyzer to run impact analysis before implementing changes Integration with Documents Any documents such as functional or technical

specifications can be attached to Change Re- quests and Change Documents for a consistent and easy access to relevant documents in a change process

1 Currently only available via a SAP Consulting or for SAP MaxAttention customers – will be available in standard with one of the feature packs of the next SAP Solution Manager release.