Lite Task Management for SAP Projects with CHARM

[odedd]

Hello!

In this post I will present a way to manage Development Task Management in SAP Projects using SOLMAN tools in a lightweight manner. Of course we can always use the heavyweight tools such as ITPPM and Focused Build but many customers cannot support all the overhead and require an elegant and cheap solution.

In many CHARM (Change Request Management) implementations I have added several statuses to the Change Documents to support the recording and management of specification and development tasks of the change. These statuses are not directly relevant to the Transports but give the PMO a good picture on development tasks – if they are completed or lagging. These additional statuses are not needed specifically for the Transport management and can complicate the Normal Changes.

So – I came upon a different strategy: Why not add these tasks to the Normal Change itself as subtasks and leave the original statuses intact? Is it possible? Yes and here’s how:

We add Development Tasks to the Change Document as loosely linked follow up tasks. :

For example you can define a Normal Change for a new Sales Order Process with 3 developments for a new input screen, a new Sales order Type and a new Interface program. These three tasks can be managed by the linked Z003 Tasks with their own status cycle unrelated to the Normal Change statuses.

Implementation

1. When you click on the “Create Follow-Up” button in the Normal Change you can choose from the activities listed there. With appropriate customizing you can add the BT125_TASK object to this and enable the creation of the 1003 transaction type – Tasks.


2. Copy the 1003 transaction type to Z003. Now you can use this and customize it to your needs.

     3. You can now define your required statuses. For example: 

          Planned, Technical Spec Done, Customer Approved, Developed, Unit Tested,

          Completed

4. Now you can jazz up the Z003 transaction and add fields as you wish using AET for CRM. For example I added a “Task Type” field for WRICEF and other task types. This can be used even for Non SAP tasks. I also added a Sprint field for quasi Agile planning and an Hours field for effort planning.

      5. Authorizations should be given to whoever will be performing these tasks, i.e.

          developers and consultants.

      6. So now you can create one or more subtasks for every Normal Change and see them

          in the Related Transactions assignment block. You can pick one and edit.

      7. Now you can get to the list of tasks directly via the CRM query. Go to “Service

          Operations“ and search for Activities:

8. You will get the standard query for Activities / Tasks. Notice in the image below that the first column has the Normal Change number (or the Service Order number as it appears in the Task itself). This does not appear in the standard query and has to be added by development. A decent CRM developer can do it in 10 minutes. Yes, it would be nice if SAP added this to standard!

So what we have built here is a task management system connected to the Normal Changes that can be used by the people responsible to each task and can be reported in a CRM query.

The training for this is a few minutes and it is quite simple to implement.

To give an even better picture you can use the Request for Change (SMCR) for new project requests, and even Business Requirements (SMBR) to represent the terms of the contract / tender.

Good Luck in your Task Management!

Oded Dagan

 

 

[former_member611427]

Dear Oded Dogan,

Thanks for the useful insights. We are also using similar approach to manage our tasks and change requests. We have linked RfC (SMCR) and tasks and we can see the related data/info in our CRM queries/reports.

Now we wanted to extend the same into BW and then on to ChaRM dashboard in Solman. Somehow, we are not able to get the task related info any of the ChaRM related BW queries or infocubes.

Any idea on how we can achieve this?

Regards,

Mohammed

[ucabazz]

Hi Oded Dagan,

Thank you, very helpful!

--Abay