Will concurrent SAP development projects affect HR and payroll?

Will concurrent SAP development projects affect HR and payroll?

We are upgrading a classic SAP 4.6C landscape (development, QA and production) to ECC 6.0 and Unicode. The HR included in our current landscape does not include any payroll process.

At the same time, another project is starting to develop payroll and will be active in beginning 2008. They will develop payroll on the first available "upgrade copy" of the upgrade process and will continue their activities up to beginning 2008. Meanwhile, on the basic upgraded 4.6C landscape, we still run the old HR implementation (with external payroll).

We are afraid that the concurrent development in the two projects may quickly become a nightmare, and that sooner or later HR payroll developments will need to be injected as source development of the classic landscape.

What do you advise regarding this situation?

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During an upgrade project, you will have two development systems. One in the original release and another is the upgraded version to be used for HR development. Implementing new developments during an upgrade project is always difficult.

First of all, you will want to implement the new developments in the new release. But this raises two questions.

  1. How you can do this without proper testing and stabilizing the system after it has been upgraded?
  2. How will you integrate the new application after the production system has been upgraded?
I assume that you will transport all your changes from the HR to the original development system. This might work -- if the module being implemented is running more or less independent from the others already in use and if you're able to keep track of all modification in an organized manner.

Of course, in the real world, this might indeed be a nightmare -- especially if both development systems start to differ during the course of time.

This was first published in March 2007

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