The Most Overlooked Critical SAP Support Function

Although it is true that many SAP specialist support functions and skillsets can be called critical, I have consistently found one important area that tends to be overlooked until the last minute—Computer Operations for the SAP enterprise, or the SAP Operations staff.

SAP Operations Expectations

Most often, the team tasked with managing and generally supporting the SAP infrastructure when it is beyond special-project status is labeled “Computer Operations” or simply Operations. For our purposes here, I wish to label all but the most basic outfits “SAP Operations.” This team usually already supports other mission-critical computing systems, is staffed or organized to do so 24×7, and is familiar with processes and procedures geared toward ensuring that the systems under their charge continue to operate smoothly around the clock.

Rather than leveraging this team, what tends to happen is that the core SAP project team and a bunch of consultants gain all of the experience germane to supporting SAP once implemented, but then fail to share this knowledge with the operators. Bad move. Expensive move.

I like to think that one of the best-kept secrets in any SAP implementation is the Computer Operations group. What should occur soon after the SAP Data Center is developed or built from scratch, many months before Go-Live, includes the following:

• The SAP Infrastructure Manager or team leader should establish a basis for an ongoing relationship with Computer Operations. This is best accomplished by including operations to some degree in the installation and configuration stages of an SAP project, as well as including them in regular status meetings and the like.

• A smooth transition of all of the services handled by the SAP project team must occur. This equates to clear communication and delineation of tasks that need to be transitioned, including hand-off of day-to-day operations and other similar documentation that works!

• Each team must be cognizant of, and focused on, minimizing disruptions to ongoing business. That is, operations must continue to support their current computing environments, and the SAP project team must continue to ensure that the needs of the developers, folks training on the current systems, and other pre-production users are satisfied.

SAP Operations can play a key role in ensuring high availability and as-expected performance, if they are trained, enabled, and kept in the loop. In the next few sections, I take a closer look at exactly how this often-underutilized resource can provide huge value to an SAP project.

SAP Monitoring—Ensuring Highly Available Systems

When it comes to monitoring your SAP system, entire volumes can be written on administration activities that must take place on a regular basis. Indeed, quite a few books exist on the topic of SAP Administration. But when it comes to actually performing various operations tasks, tools, and approaches like those illustrated in Figure 12.7 and described in the following list they are sorely overlooked. Consider the following:

• The SAP Operations Manual, which embodies everything when it comes to ensuring that SAP is up, available, and safeguarded against loss or disaster.

• Documented daily procedures, the actual checklists that can be used for daily regularly scheduled activities (at least until an automated approach is developed via an SAP-aware enterprise management tool). I like to use CCMS, especially transaction SSAA, to drive much of this.

• Other documented regularly scheduled procedures, including weekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannual, and annual operations activities.

• Well-documented procedures and approaches to systems backup/restore and complete rebuilds, such that even a novice could perform a restore (in the event of a disaster, for example).

• Leveraging CCMS and other manual processes/checklists, including using scripting utilities to take the burden of data collection off the operator.

• Approaches to defining enterprise management requirements for SAP, and then evaluating and selecting the best Systems Management application for your SAP environment.

• Various approaches for sharing all of the documented procedures and processes mentioned in the preceding list, including using standard Web sites/Web pages, to full-blown portals/knowledge repositories, to simple Word and Excel documents within a structured file-share.

• Processes for accurately maintaining your SAP documentation, as well as how to regularly review and update it.

• Practice drills for improving operations and availability; restoring backups, testing cluster failovers and disaster recovery failovers, and mimicking other failures up and down the entire solution stack.

▸	To learn more about the role that SAP Operations plays in terms of systems management and monitoring, and exactly how all of the aforementioned approaches can be employed, see“Systems Management Techniques for SAP,” p. 511 in Chapter 14.

Taking Advantage of SAP Operations

As I stated previously, SAP Operations represents a perfect breeding ground for future SAP TSO professionals. It only makes sense—business-wise, financially, and employee-wise—that the Computer Operations team be pushed to support SAP infrastructure changes as they occur, be engaged in monitoring, assist in implementing changes to the solution stack, and more. Given their knowledge of the foundation, and the company’s overall legacy computing environment, a good operator is well-positioned (with appropriate training, mentoring, or experience) to move into SAP TSO roles like junior-level database administration, SAP basis/infrastructure, and even entry-level enterprise integration roles. Given this, I believe that both line management and your project’s management circle needs to be very aggressive about providing training and education to these folks.

From a day-to-day perspective, SAP Operations can prove highly useful to the organization. Specifically, they can assist in kernel upgrades, perform infrastructure updates, apply support packages, monitor key performance indicators, help with SAP client maintenance, and more. They can run through the general and regularly scheduled activities outlined in transaction SSAA, reporting on the health of your entire SAP system. In essence, the SAP Operations team can easily become the “backup” to the support staff primarily responsible for such activities, and thus serve a couple of purposes—they help the company not only mitigate risk, but also provide promote-from-within opportunities, thereby attracting additional talented folks naturally drawn to such organizations. And they allow the senior SAP TSO members the luxury of more time to look down the road at strategic issues, freeing them from some of the tactical day-to-day tasks so readily seized by career-minded operators.

Change Control—Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Much of the activity involved with implementing and managing SAP involves managing change. Changes are guaranteed to occur, and will affect every layer of the SAP Solution Stack. Perhaps the most common perception of change as it relates to SAP is geared toward functional changes. That is, the customizers, programmers, and other developers continue to enhance functionality of the SAP system throughout its life. Support packages also add functionality, and more often resolve issues in different functional areas. Legacy systems are tied in and retired. Through all of this, the system evolves, and indeed controlling these changes is paramount to ensuring that the changes are both stable and capable of being “backed out” if necessary.

But change occurs within and between all layers of the SAP Solution Stack, not just inside the application layer. And our SAP Operations team plays a critical role here, too. For it’s here that the “rubber meets the road.” All of the planning, research, and testing inherent to each change in the stack culminates in a change to Production. So unless the SAP Basis team is dead set on supporting every single operating system patch/service pack upgrade, or database update, or hardware/firmware upgrade, it just makes good business sense to leverage a company’s investment in its computer operations staff—they’re already onsite, are anxious to learn, and are almost certainly interested in increasing their SAP literacy.

The same can be said of the next most often-overlooked resource in a company’s IT organization, the help desk staff. I take a closer look at this next.

▸	To better understand the role of change management and change control in an SAP project, see“Change Management Best Practices and Approaches,” p. 469 in Chapter 13.