As the benefits of DevOps become more and more clear, it's increasingly important to be able to justify moving from traditional IT approaches to new ways of working. Some organisations aren't quite ready for a switch to DevOps, so implementing an Agile delivery model may be an easier first step. In this eBook we'll explain why methodologies like Agile and continuous delivery have huge relevance in the world of SAP and why you should be making changes today.

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5 REASONS WHY YOU NEED
AN AGILE DELIVERY MODEL FOR SAP

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Business Impact
The developing digital economy is driving a big change in the way
applications and infrastructure are provisioned and delivered.
But what if you’re running applications like SAP and the digital
transformation doesn’t have a direct impact on you, at least not right now?
Perhaps you’re focused on trying to improve operational efficiency and
implement process improvements, and you want to be able to deliver them
with the minimum of disruption.
In that case you might be wondering why methodologies like Agile, Lean,
DevOps and Continuous Delivery have any relevance - you already have
robust processes in place to deliver applications in a traditional way, after all.
The answer is the early delivery of business value.

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IN LARGE RELEASES
Traditional
Development
The business waits a long time to get
new features, so people get frustrated
It’s difficult to change direction or
refine what was asked for;
There are high levels of business
impact and testing;
Recovery from failure is difficult and
time consuming due to the volume
of changes deployed all at once - so
there’s less time to build new features.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with delivering applications
in a waterfall fashion, where they’re pre-planned, budgeted
and have a well defined scope, but working this way doesn’t
mean that risk is removed.
A more agile approach to managing application change allows
requirements to be delivered to the business in shorter, more
frequent releases.
So what’s so good about that and why should you do it?

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Designed to inhibit change
In traditional development requirements are
documented up-front based on what people think
they want at that time. When the project gets
delivered - often many months later - stakeholders
realise that things don’t work as they expected or,
even worse, it’s taken so long to deliver that they’re no
longer relevant.
Day-one obsolescence and the spectre of ‘feature
creep’ can hang over long-running projects. More
and more requirements are “discovered” during
design, build and test, becoming increasingly hard to
accommodate.

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Agile Development
Agile accelerates business value delivery, and
through a process of continuous planning and
feedback, ensures that value continues to be
maximized throughout the development process.
WHY AGILE?
1. Fail fast and respond
Delivering requirements at speed enables fast feedback
loops for constant improvement.
2. Smaller chunks reduce risk and impact
Splitting releases into smaller batches allows the simpler
and faster delivery of critical features.
3. Avoid temporary workarounds
Taking a lean approach to delivery ensures that solutions
are more efficient and cost effective.
4. Visibility, Control Measurement
Involving all stakeholders on a day-to-day basis creates
better visibility and ensures that priorities are constantly
managed.
5. Fast recovery
The risk and uncertainty that surrounds massive deploy-
ments is almost eliminated, freeing more time to spend
building new features and creating business value.

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1. Fail fast and respond
One of the key benefits of an Agile approach is that
requirements are delivered faster so the business can
benefit from them far sooner. And, even if they don’t
quite work right, fast feedback loops enable constant
improvement.
Agile development permits the business to
experience this delivery “failure” and learn from it so
that less time is wasted building things that no one
wants. It allows testing of what’s been built to ensure
that it meets business needs - in the “old world”
nothing would have been seen until the end of a long
project many months later, with little or no opportunity
to make changes.

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2. Smaller chunks reduce risk and impact
With big releases come big risks and impact. Deploy-
ing hundreds or thousands of changes at once might
seem like a better way of doing things but it’s hugely
risky and there’s a large business impact (adopting
and learning many new features and processes at the
same time requires considerable effort).
Breaking down releases into smaller, more man-
ageable chunks takes away a large element of risk.
It makes testing and user adoption far simpler and
allows immediate deployment of distinct changes as
soon as they’re ready to go.
Some analysis of existing business processes is
required in order to fully understand the impact of
more frequent deployment, but an Agile approach
means that changes can be accepted into produc-
tion much faster.

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3. Avoid temporary workarounds
When the pace of change is slow, people natural-
ly attempt to build creative solutions that can work
around bottlenecks and be delivered more quickly.
Unfortunately, most of these temporary
workarounds don’t operate in an optimal way. It’s all
too easy for them to become permanently embed-
ded into processes, creating large levels of technical
debt and a high cost to maintain and run.
Agile development avoids these workarounds be-
cause the delivery pipeline moves faster. Not only
are solutions more efficient, but they’ll be easier and
cheaper to run in the long term as well.

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4. Visibility, control and measurement
In traditional development the testing is largely done
in one big lump at the end. That means it’s almost
impossible to know the current status of anything or
to anticipate and manage issues as they arise.
Agile processes promote transparency through the
involvement of all stakeholders on a day-to-day basis.
Business requirements live in a constantly updated
and prioritized product backlog and in each iteration
it’s easy to see what’s been done, what needs to be
done and what the risks and blockers are.
As users are actively involved they can steer
development at every step of the way. And if
requirements change it’s much easier for the team to
shift attention to higher priorities.

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5. Fast recovery
So what do you do when something goes wrong
after the deployment of a project? It’s really hard to
measure and recover from failure when changing
many things in each release.
The smaller deployments that come with Agile
processes make it far easier and faster to unpick any
issues and provide the necessary resolutions.
The risk and uncertainty that surrounds massive
deployments is almost eliminated, freeing more time
to spend building new features and creating business
value.

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The methodologies introduced earlier - DevOps, Lean, Agile
and Continuous Delivery - are an ideal way to approach major
programmes of change such as a digital transformation project.
However, they also support a much more efficient IT delivery model
that’s designed to give the business exactly what it needs, when it
needs it, regardless of the bigger picture.
When applied to SAP this can transform what is all too often a slow
and inflexible way of delivering business value.
An efficient IT delivery
model

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In the digital economy, agility is fundamental. We focus on continuous
delivery – helping our customers align IT closer to the business.
At Basis Technologies we create automation tools that allow
companies to deliver enterprise application changes at the speed of
business.
By harnessing the agility of our DevOps suite, thousands of IT
professionals worldwide are able to deliver high-quality SAP releases at
pace capitalizing on their current infrastructure and remaining relevant
to future business strategy. The results produce faster time-to-market,
longer production uptime, and lower operational costs.
Email info@basistechnologies.com
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