Flavors of Agile - Agile ASAP

 

Change of plans, and I apologize for the delay.  My intent was to cover, very briefly, three more flavors of Agile in one post, so that I could get to scalable approaches sooner.  These flavors are:

1. Agile ASAP
2. Feature Driven Development (FDD)
3. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

As I was working on this, I realized that I could not address all three in adequate detail without writing a short book (I'm trying to keep my posts more concise.  Trying…), and both FDD and DAD have elements of scalability built into them.  Addressing them individually makes more sense.

In case you've never worked on an SAP project (or maybe even if you have), ASAP stands for Accelerated SAP.  It is SAP's implementation methodology for SAP solutions, with end-to-end coverage of the Process Lifecycle, Application Lifecycle, Project Lifecycle, and Value Lifecycle.

ASAP addresses:

• Project Management
• Organizational Change Management
• Data Management
• Business Process Management
• Technical Solution Management
•  Integration Solution Management

…and provides templates, tools, questionnaires, checklists, and guidebooks to assist the project team.  I'd explain more, but I'm not sure I can condense a four day training class into a blog post; it is not a lightweight methodology.  So, how is this Agile?  It's not.  ASAP is the foundation for Agile ASAP.

What is Agile ASAP, then?  Essentially, it is a slightly lighter-weight methodology that uses elements of Lean and Scrum during development.  Kind of.  There's a little more to it than that, but I'm trying to keep it simple and I don't want to lose your attention rehashing Lean and Scrum. 

If you're using ASAP, Agile ASAP may be a good fit for you (transitioning to Agile is challenging), but it's really for SAP implementation projects, so I don't recommend it if you're working on other types of projects.

I've been working on several SAP implementations, over the last couple of years.  We haven't used ASAP, largely because of the technical requirements.  There are some specific requirements for your SAP landscape and SAP Solution Manager to use the methodology effectively that the company I work for has only recently started to pursue.  The new version of Solution Manager can, reportedly, be used for more than just SAP projects, and has integrated with Microsoft Project, to some extent, for the last couple of versions, at least.  It can add a lot of value if you have the time and resources to get everything set up correctly.

If you have experience using ASAP or Agile ASAP, please share your experience in the comments.