One of the things I do in my day job is to oversee the HANA projects that we have going on. I usually provide some advice at the beginning, have a QA role and if the project needs a little help at critical points, I'll get stuck in. I've done this on all the 32 HANA projects we had going on over the last year and so I've got a few battle scars. I thought I'd share my experiences, which relate to any SAP upgrade or migration project but which are particularly important for SAP HANA Migrations.
Why are they particularly important? Well, businesses have high expectations of HANA and it's not just a "database" shift to the business. They have been promised amazing things, and it is important that you setup the project to succeed. Here are my rules.
1) Governance is by far the most important thing
I learnt everything I know about this from master project manager Kiran Patel. When Kiran is managing the project, I don't even need to check on anything. With a good project manager, you can have bad infrastructure, business delays, a flood or even bad technical resources. They will ensure that the business is kept in check, timelines are assured and acts of god are avoided. OK, maybe not the act of god. They will get the right resource model both with the business, customer IT and third party suppliers and manage the relationship between customer, SAP and consulting.
