The first activity in initiating any Application Managed Services Engagement is to obtain a transition. The transition would always be from an “Incumbent”. An incumbent could be the customer directly or an IT Services company who is currently managing the AMS engagement
The Transition phase is like “testing the waters” for both the customer and the new AMS partner
The biggest stakeholder during the transition (as well as steady state) phase is always the Business. Hence there is a need to ensure that SOWs should typically have stringent SLAs, KPIs and hefty penalties during the transition period to ensure that end business does not suffer due to the transition activities and they also get a feel of what lies ahead
Further if things are not working out as expected, it is always better to sever the AMS engagement at the early stage of transition itself than to take the relationship further. This gives you amongst other options, the option to return to your incumbent before they exit the engagement. To enable this stringent SLAs and KPIs are needed to track the progress of the transition
An AMS partner who sees stringent SLAs, OLAs and KPIs in the SOW for transition phase would also ensure they come fully prepared to handle the engagement and “hit the ground running” starting Day 1 of the Transition (Planning/Due Diligence Phase)
A large-scale transition of SAP applications would typically involve 5 phases - 1) Planning/Due Diligence 2) Knowledge Acquisition 3) Secondary Support 4) Primary Support 5) Stabilization (and post this get into steady state)
The “Pre-Planning” phase is in many ways akin to the “Discover” phase under the Activate methodology
- Where it’s not just the customer’s core team that is enabled to understand breadth, depth, and functionality, benefits and value the engagement can bring to customers’ business but
- Its also a period the incoming AMS partner will set the stage for the subsequent 5 phases of the transition including establishing readiness to handle the SLAs, KPIs.
- Its also a time the incumbent AMS Partner can showcase their capabilities in greater depth be it Transition tools and methodologies, embedding probes/bots, Industry 4.0 technologies, Automation, Business AI and establish comfort levels with the customer’s business and IT.
- This is even more crucial when the applications under transition are SAP applications due to the complexity and constant introduction of new features involved
This ‘pre-planning' phase would add more value if done in person and greatly helps set the context and alignment both with the customer business and IT
In my experience in the role of an SAP FICO consultant who has received /given Transition as well as in my role of an SAP Transition Manager for several leading corporates including the corporate that is today on the largest SAP Instance in the world I would strongly recommend this additional phase – ‘Pre-Planning’ prior to the commencement of the Planning/Due Diligence phase. This will help the incoming AMS partner to be fully functional from Day 1 of Planning (Due Diligence) and hit the ground running, thereby giving a jumpstart to the AMS partner to be better prepared to meet the SLAs and KPIs
