PROJECT AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project and Project Management



Project Preparation and the Project Plan

Introduction

In the first part of this series we looked at what is an SAP project and what are the possible types of such projects. We also presented an overview of the phases of SAP projects. In this article we discuss the issues relating to the “Project Preparation” phase. Other names sometimes used are “Planning Phase” or “Planning and Scoping Phase” etc. Whatever the name, the main goal of this phase is to clarify and communicate important aspects of the project such as the project goals, the needed resources and the way these resources will be employed to achieve the goals. These important aspects of the project are put down in writing in the Project Plan document, which is the most important deliverable of this phase and for many project managers the single most important document for the whole duration of the project (PMI, 2010,, 27).

The project manager is tasked with three major activities to be performed during the project preparation phase:

•Collect all the necessary project information

•Plan and organize the project staffing and timelines

•Deliver the project plan document.

Most project managers will choose to perform these activities more or less simultaneously during the project preparation phase as this offers the advantage of “fine tuning” the project plan document as new information becomes available. In the following sections we will present these activities in detail, hopefully providing some useful tips on issues that require special attention.

Collecting the necessary project information

The first task of the project manager is to start gathering information about the project. This information is necessary in order to help put together the project team, plan the project staffing and timelines and deliver the Project Plan document. For the vast majority of SAP projects, it all comes down to five major subject areas the project manager should address in order to collect all the relevant information:

•the project objectives and goals

•the software (license) requirements

•the hardware (system and capacity) requirements

•the human resources requirements and

•the project risks

Project objectives and goals

It is essential to get a good understanding of the project goals: what is the expected outcome of the project. Interviews with the customer responsible people will help the project manager determine and clarify these. The project goals must be written down and reviewed by the customer. The level of information must be detailed enough to give the project manager a good idea of the resources that will be required in order to accomplish the expected outcome. The project goals may differ a lot between different kinds of projects1. A roll out project for example will aim to implement a global template to new regions/countries; an upgrade project will probably aim to replace an existing SAP system with a newer version of the SAP ERP; a carve in/carve out project will attempt to either merge an acquired company's business into an existing system or carve out a part of the business onto another SAP ...