5.1. SAP IT, Meet “The Business”
SAP AG touts its enterprise applications as business solutions configured by business consultants. Given this claim, it's safe to say that the developers who perform the functional configuration of an SAP system are experts in their particular business area and bring with them the added advantage of programming or systems development experience. This business knowledge is important to the team responsible for maintaining a well-performing system. But, building such a one-sided team to conduct performance testing—a team unfamiliar and largely uninterested in the system's underlying technical foundation—will result in failure. Conversely, building a team strong only in SAP Basis and test tools but ungrounded in the business at hand will fail as well. Instead, it is essential that your testing and tuning team represent the proper balance of both business-savvy “functional” folks and IT specialists. In this way, the business expertise as well as SAP Technology Stack experience and testing/tuning tool-set skills useful in testing, analyzing, and generally managing a system's performance can be brought together under one roof.
In general, your goal is to staff a lean testing and tuning organization, not just for the obvious cost benefits but in the name of “effectiveness.” In my experience, bringing together a lot of people (relatively speaking, of course, depending on the breadth of your SAP enterprise) tends to be counterproductive, as it slows down decision making related not only to planning but also to execution, and clouds what should be a clear team vision. Other key aims include the following:
Appoint a leader or manager with both the responsibility and empowerment necessary to drive the team while effectively working with sister IT and business-oriented groups. This leader will provide overall vision to the team, keeping individuals both focused and aware of their unique role within the organization. Not surprisingly, the sound team and project-based leadership provided by the person holding this role will go a long way in making the team successful—a team I loosely refer to as the T3—the “testing and tuning team,” to be detailed later.
Identify both IT and business process (functional area) leaders outside of the team to act as single points of contact back into the T3.
Keeping minimal staffing in mind, do your best to bring in folks experienced in a number of cross-disciplines rather than a number of folks each of whom are highly focused experts on a single subject, or subject-matter experts (SMEs).
Seek folks with a combination of both SAP IT and SAP business process experience—another way of killing two SAP birds with one SAP stone.
So, based on what you hope to achieve, you'll tweak your staffing plans in any number of ways; new implementations and major upgrades may be handled one way, whereas technical refreshes may be dealt with in another. And, stress testing your regular post–Go-Live quarterly updates will probably be handled in yet another way.
Regardless of your particular team structure, or whether its central focus is on maximizing performance, availability, or scalability, I find that the T3 is most successful when it is tightly aligned to the company's change management organization responsible for SAP. In the case of large SAP environments, I encourage my customers to deploy the T3 as a blended functional/technical department that works hand-in-hand with the core business groups that use the systems and the core IT organizations that support them. Within the context of smaller SAP environments, I find that the lines between the core business/IT organizations and the T3 are much more blurred, to the point of disappearing entirely in many cases. But, there are a few key interteam relationships that remain pivotal despite the size of your SAP implementation or IT department:
The T3 leadership component must have a keen understanding of, and relationship with, the business organizations and IT groups with whom they form a liaison. This implies that, for credibility reasons (among more obvious reasons), the T3 itself must be staffed with both business process staff and IT-centric staff.
With regard to the business side of the house, this experience is often quite specific to an individual's business area of focus, such as R/3 materials management or APO demand planning; relationships with each group helps ensure that its needs are brought to bear, promoting the T3's continuing value proposition in the process.
Similarly, company internal IT relationships must be cemented at a number of levels—at the “colleague” level, where colleagues call on each other for assistance, as well as at the midlevel and senior management positions, where relationships are pushed “down” the organization by virtue of strategic vision.
The specific experience each tester brings to the table in terms of his or her test tool and mySAP Business Suite or other SAP application experience is huge—for example, different SAP products lend themselves to different testing methods, tools, and so on. Thus, relationships with your technology partners represent the final relationship “ingredient” in a fully baked T3 staffing plan.
The effectiveness of the stress-testing work performed can be directly tied to the level of experience of the team, as should be evident in the preceding list. One reason for this situation is that there is very little formal education offered on stress-testing methods, building test cases, or even planning and executing load tests (hence, one of the key reasons for this book). Even the materials published by various test-tool vendors and SAP AG are light, subject to large gaps when it comes to end-to-end stress testing and tuning. The formal training that SAP programming and functional folks receive includes some level of necessary single-unit testing, often under the obligatory umbrella of Computer-Aided Test Tool (CATT-) or eCATT-driven functional testing, detailed in Chapter 6. Thus, on-the-job training (OJT) tends to prove most valuable in building a core testing competency within an organization—typically not the most cost-effective method of doing anything!
On the other hand, if the alternative to OJT is staffing your T3 with experienced though expensive contractors and consultants, OJT may look pretty good for satisfying long-term organizational needs while keeping your budget in check. We'll go over the trade-offs of staffing with third parties later. In the meantime, remember that very few functional or SAP Basis courses devote more than a few cursory minutes to load testing—so a flexible approach to learning is mandated, regardless. Begin thinking about how you can take advantage of nontraditional learning approaches within your own team.