AMIGO for SAP –
Your SAP Transformation Guide to

The Integrated Core

Woven through this roadmap, AMIGO™ will help you execute every aspect of the Integrated Core™.

Proper execution of the integrated core model on your SAP-Driven Transformation Initiatives will put you in the very elite category of the 35% of complex software initiatives that deliver on time, on budget, and with the value anticipated at the onset of the initiative.

Within the integrated core, AMIGO provides your Program and Project Leadership with everything they need to successfully lead all aspects of your transformation, including:

1. People: AMIGO’s™ Organizational Transformation methods will help you win the hearts and minds of your project team and the people in the organization who will benefit from your initiative.
2. Process: AMIGO’s™ Business Process decomposition methods will help you properly build your Enterprise’s Business Process Decomposition model and integrate it with the People, Technology, Data, and Regulatory Compliance needed to get your business to THRIVE into the future.
3. Technology: AMIGO™ will help your Program and Project Leadership build coalitions to properly and objectively select the best software and technologies needed to execute your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation roadmap.
4. Data: AMIGO™ will help you determine and organize your strategic data. This is the bloodline of the organization and how to migrate that data from the old ways of doing business to the new ways you are establishing as of your transformation. Additionally, AMIGO™ provides the capability to keep that data clean throughout the enterprise model through our Master Data Governance design functionality. This capability will enable your leadership to continually make decisions using the best and correct information.
5. Value: If desired, With AMIGO™, you can properly build your business case to give your project sponsors the information they need to understand how much value this project has to offer. AMIGO™ provides the ability to ensure that the benefits identified are built into the end solution so that every Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is known upfront before development has begun. Finally, AMIGO™ provides the capabilities to ensure the mechanisms are in place to harvest the value after you go live and can report to your leadership that this solution is making the return on investment described in the initial business case.
6. Governance: AMIGO™ provides your Program and Project Leaders everything they need to properly govern every aspect of your initiative using these aspects of our Integrated Core™:
1. Project Organization and Resources
2. Proper Project Planning & Tracking
3. Budget Planning and Cost Management
4. Communications Management
5. Scope Management
6. Risk, Action, Issue and Key Decision (RAID) Management
7. Knowledge Management
8. Quality Control

Project Organization and Resources

The Organization & Resources core fundamental focuses on determining the types of resources you need for your initiative, their roles within individual project teams, and how those roles, teams, and projects interact with one another through an overarching governance model that drives your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation towards its North Star.

AMIGO’s™ functionality will help you to:

• Define all the unique roles that your program is going to need.
• Determine how you will structure your organization through unique projects and methodologies.
• Build the right organizational matrix model to ensure proper communications and governance throughout your digital transformation journey.

Project Planning & Tracking

The core fundamentals of Project Planning and Tracking focus on the approach your initiative should take to consistently plan, track, and measure all the delivery your project teams will execute over your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation.

AMIGO™ will help you establish the standards for Program and Project Planning and the attributes required for each project team to consistently plan and execute their work. It will then be possible to roll that data up into a consistent measurement tool for you and your program leadership to review.

For every phase of every project within the scope of this initiative, your project managers will be able to finalize detailed, resource-loaded project plans in AMIGO™. These plans will reflect all the following:

• Project deliverables and work packages
• Project management deliverables and work packages
• Quality assurance deliverables and work packages
• Organizational Change management deliverables
• Training deliverables and work packages
• Milestones

AMIGO™ provides your project managers with accelerated project plans based on SAP’s Activate methodology and leading practices. Your project managers can take these accelerators and add the relevant deliverables and work packages from the final agreed scope/approach unique to your initiative. The project management team further edits the plan to include:

• Outcome-based work package descriptions
• Calculated Work Package start and end dates
• Dependencies
• Duration
• Work effort

During this iterative planning process, the working team will use AMIGO™ to review assignments, resources, and resource allocations. Their insights are added to the plan’s resource schedule to ensure that the plan reflects resource allocations, availability, task owners, and task/work-related details.

The finalization of the project plan is an iterative cycle of planning, reviewing, refining, and editing. This ensures working team members help determine time commitments and understand the effort, tasks, sequence, and dates that will govern the project schedule and ensure on-time delivery.

Once tasks, resources, dates, and related details are finalized, the plan is ratified, approved, and baselined. The ratified plan establishes a project schedule. This schedule can be used to manage and control the project. It can also help us evaluate condition changes impacting the critical path, milestones, and overall project schedule health. Plan management includes weekly updates by the project management to reflect:

• Percentage completed
• New tasks dependencies
• New resource assignments
• Revised start and/or end dates
• Actual hours worked by resource/by work package

AMIGO™ is then used to track and document project tasks and activities. AMIGO™ includes familiar scheduling features such as Gantt Charts and burn down charts. It also has powerful report creation and sharing capabilities to keep all stakeholders informed.

A key differentiator that our solution provides (versus other tools in the market today, like Microsoft Project) is its automated orchestration engine. Within AMIGO™, you can set your project plans to run on autopilot, which will automatically trigger the next set of tasks to execute when a given predecessor task is completed.

This capability frees up your project managers from the bureaucracy associated with administering the plan and allows them to analyze results and help remove blockers on the project’s critical chain.

Here are additional capabilities AMIGO™ provides that no other project planning and execution tool on the market today can claim:

The beauty of AMIGO™ is that most of the team does not have to look at the plan to find out what to do. AMIGO™ will automatically send emails explaining exactly what it is they need to do in their role as the Responsible party for the delivery of a given piece of work.

• It provides guided instructions on how to perform that work (through our solution’s integrated methodology capabilities).
  

• It will tell the user who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (aka RACI) on their work package, as well as the predecessor and successor work packages associated with their piece of work.
• It shows the user all the Risks, Issues, Actions, Key Decisions, and Change Requests associated with their piece of work.
• Once the user completes the work, they can submit their work to the RACI members that have been established as approvers of the work. Once the final RACI member digitally approves the work (or the timer established by ASBO expires), our solution will update the master plan with the completion of that work package and send out notifications for the next set of work packages to start.

Budget Planning and Cost Management

The Budget Planning & Cost Management core fundamental built into AMIGO™ focuses on what it takes to establish and negotiate the proper budget to deliver all the aspects of your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation.

AMIGO™ provides your Program Leaders and Managers with the capabilities to develop the appropriate budget and tracking mechanisms.

Communications Management

The Communications Management core fundamental built into AMIGO™ ensures that your organization is providing the right stakeholders with the right information at the right time. We recognize the importance of project team-level communication to overall project success. Project communication from all levels contributes to the overall direction, efficiency, expectation management, and ability to course-correct throughout the project lifecycle.

With AMIGO™, all of the processes, procedures, and technologies are built to enable you to successfully implement your communications strategy. 

Scope Management

The Scope Management core fundamental built in AMIGO™ focuses on one of the most challenging facets of any SAP initiative, and that is managing scope. This core fundamental can make or break your implementation.

AMIGO™ provides you the capability to establish clear definitions of the scope of your program and establish rigorous processes on how to manage the myriad of change requests your program will be bombarded with throughout your implementation journey.

Risks, Actions, Issues & Key Decision (RAID) Management

The Risks, Actions, Issues & Key Decisions core fundamental (also known as RAID) focuses on the core of your Program Governance

With AMIGO™, you have all the processes, data, technology and workflows necessary to manage every risk, action, issue, key decision and lesson learned throughout your transformation journey.

Risk Management

Risk management will be executed throughout the life of the project to iteratively identify, track, and monitor.

Use the processes and technologies built into AMIGO™ to facilitate early identification of risks, clear accountability, tracking and monitoring of dependencies, escalation as appropriate, and timely.

Action Management

Action Management occurs for those things that come up during an implementation that fall outside a formal project plan. Without proper governance, these actions typically do not complete as needed, which impacts the delivery of your solution.

Use the processes and technologies built into AMIGO™ to facilitate the collection, workflow management, monitoring, approvals, and completion of all action items that

occur during the implementation of your solution.

Issue Management

Issue management is the process of identifying and resolving issues. Problems with staff or vendors, technical failures, integration challenges– these might all have a negative impact on your project. If the issue goes unresolved, you risk creating unnecessary conflicts, delays, or even failure to produce your deliverables and work packages.

Use the processes and technologies built into AMIGO™ to facilitate the collection, workflow management, communications, approvals, monitoring, and completion of all issues that occur during the implementation of your solution.

Key Decision Management

Slow decision-making is an implementation KILLER! When our decision-making ability is impeded, this can slow things down, causing delays, frustration, and customer dissatisfaction.

With AMIGO™, you can monitor the key decisions that are impacting the critical path of the implementation, and, using the escalation methods, we will put them in place to ensure that key decisions are in place before they impact the project timeline.

Use the processes and technologies built into AMIGO™ to facilitate the collection, workflow management, communications, approvals, monitoring, and completion of all key decisions that occur during the implementation of your solution.

Knowledge Management

The Knowledge Retention core fundamental focuses on all the activities you need to perform in preparation for when your consultants walk out the door, and you are on your own to support and evolve your SAP solution. With AMIGO™, we provide the capabilities to ensure that the proper mechanisms are established at the beginning of your initiative to capture all relevant content correctly and that all relevant content has been properly transferred to the appropriate resources in your remaining organization so they can properly support your solution for years to come.

Quality Management

All the work that will go into this implementation will be for naught if what is implemented fails to meet your business objectives. 

AMIGO™ provides the capabilities to manage your entire Quality Assurance Program.

The Quality Control core fundamental built into AMIGO™ focuses on your ability to review, assess, measure, report, and advise on the overall quality of your digital transformation implementation.

As a Program Leader, you don’t want your legacy tarnished by delivering an SAP product that does not work for your organization. Be sure you put the effort into quality control. Quality Control is your unsung hero. It is simply one of those things that if you do it, no one will notice, but if you don’t do it and your implementation goes bad, everyone will notice.

The Benefits AMIGO™ Provides

As described above, the key benefits of using AMIGO to run your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation Initiative are:

• Alignment with Strategic Goals: AMIGO™ helps ensure that every one of your projects is in sync with the organization’s strategic objectives. It helps prioritize projects that provide the most value, ensuring resources are invested wisely.
• Timely Delivery: AMIGO™ provides your initiative and promotes adherence to timelines and deadlines. Projects are completed on schedule, allowing organizations to capitalize on market opportunities.
• Cost Control: Keeping your initiatives within budget is a constant concern. Effective management, coupled with the cost management capabilities provided in AMIGO™, helps control costs by monitoring and managing resources, preventing overruns.
• Efficient Resource Allocation: AMIGO™ helps ensure efficient allocation of resources—both human and financial. Eliminating redundancy and optimizing resource allocation helps organizations save time and money.
• Improved Communications: AMIGO™ encourages clear and open communication among team members, stakeholders, and executives. This transparency helps identify and address issues on time.
  • A typical SAP project has over one million communication channels daily—too many for any individual or team to coordinate. This is even further complicated because most implementations today run on a 24-hour cycle.
  • With our solution’s patent-pending AI Messenger technology, we instantaneously inform everyone about the changes that mean the most to them during the project and how they may impact their perception of the project.
    From the CEO down to the first-year employee executing a task on a project plan, our solution keeps everyone connected on your client’s complex Enterprise Digital Transformation initiative.

• Risk Mitigation: AMIGO™ provides a systematic approach to identifying and mitigating risks. This proactive risk management reduces the likelihood of project failures or costly setbacks.
• Enhanced Quality Control: Our rigorous project management methodologies and best practices, built into AMIGO™, ensure that every deliverable meets the highest quality standards. This leads to increased customer satisfaction and trust.
• Scalability: AMIGO™ is designed to enable your organization to scale its IT initiatives as needed, accommodating growth and changes in market demand.
• Change Management: Change is inevitable in your transformation roadmap and administration landscape. AMIGO™ equips your organization with the tools and strategies to adapt to changing conditions seamlessly.
• Documentation and Knowledge Transfer: Comprehensive documentation of project details and outcomes ensures that knowledge is retained and can be easily transferred, reducing reliance on individual team members. Our solution builds, governs, and maintains all of this, providing your organization with a single source of truth for every piece of content produced for your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation.
  • With this capability, AMIGO™ can help accelerate the knowledge transfer to your organization.  AMIGO™ provides digital signoffs of every component of the knowledge transfer work package to ensure both parties agree on the completeness of the knowledge transfer.

• Stakeholder satisfaction: Effectively engaging stakeholders, providing regular updates, and involving them in decision-making processes leads to higher satisfaction levels and trust in IT initiatives.
  • AMIGO™ helps ensure that every stakeholder is provided the right information through the right channel at the right time, 24/7/365.

• Competitive Advantage: Organizations that excel in Program and Project Management gain a significant competitive advantage. They can innovate faster, respond to market changes more effectively, and drive digital transformation. AMIGO™ will position you to provide these capabilities to your organization faster and with more value than competitors.
• Business Continuity: AMIGO™ contributes to better business continuity planning. Your organization is better equipped to respond and recover swiftly when disruptions occur.
• Employee Morale: AMIGO™ provides Program Leaders and Managers with a well-organized and effectively managed environment, which creates a positive work atmosphere, boosts team morale, and encourages creativity and innovation.

Imagine a new way to Accelerate Time to Value

There is a new and different way for you to deliver your SAP-Drive Enterprise initiatives on time, on budget, and with all the value promised to your executive leadership.

It’s very different from how you deliver your software implementations today because it connects everyone and everything involved with your Enterprise transformation initiatives using a single user experience and source of truth.

This new way helps you:

• accelerate your complex Enterprise Software implementations
• reduce your implementation cost
• reduce your implementation risk
• improve your return on investment
• reduce your implementation pain

The best part is that it doesn’t require dozens of software products that don’t talk to one another and hundreds of thousands of dollars in administrative fees to pull information from these software products and duct tape the information together to provide PowerPoint slides that are wrong or out of date 90% of the time.

You can deliver your complex software implementations on time and budget while providing your executive leadership with all the value promised at its inception without the stress and chaos teams typically encounter on these initiatives.

Imagine a world where every individual, every piece of content, and every aspect of your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation is connected.

An environment where your Executives can:

• Analyze and prioritize the initiatives within their portfolios based on their personalized criteria.
• Independently track the progress of your project portfolio investments.
• Assess the value being generated from those investments.
• Obtain insights on the initiatives generating the desired value and those not to help with your future investment decisions.
• Be automatically kept abreast of the key decisions they need to make for the success of their initiatives.

An environment where your Initiative Leaders can:

• Establish the goals, objectives, and success metrics for your SAP program and be able to integrate these elements into the business and data processes defined for your program.
• Manage all risks, issues, actions, and key decisions impacting your program.
• Strategically and automatically inform steering committee members of risks, issues, and key decisions requiring input.
• Analyze all key metrics for every project under your domain and the ability to drill down into the details of a project or project plan that may require attention, determine the root cause of the problem, and then work with your project managers to help solve those impasses.
• Be instantly notified of the most critical integration impacts on your overall program’s success.
• Use one source of truth to run your project leadership meetings. All of your project managers can collaborate with you online within the platform to work through inter-project challenges and resolutions.
• Pre-defined all phase and milestone program gates with clear-cut expectations and resource accountability and then measured that all expectations were met prior to moving to the next phase, milestone, or commercial payment.
• Manage all change requests with complete visibility of the integration impacts and consequences, dependency implications, and impacts on your program timeline.
• Have a perfect and immutable audit trail of every single activity that has taken place within your program.
• Manage all aspects of your program from one source of truth, where every business process, design document, risk, issue, action, key decision, change request, etc., is connected on one platform. When something changes in another area of your initiative that impacts your program, you are instantly notified and can assess how big that impact is and take corrective action.
• Know everything you are responsible for, accountable for, consulted, and need to be informed throughout an SAP initiative, and can prioritize all of your tasks and activities that hit you daily that fall outside your formal program plan.

An environment where your Project Managers can:

• Define the scope of your project down to the work package level, integrate that scope into a Gantt chart planning tool, and build out a comprehensive, dependency-driven, and resource-constrained project plan.
• Manage all aspects of your project from one source of truth, where every business process, data element, design document, risk, issue, action item, key decision, change request, etc., is connected in one system. So, when something changes that impacts your project, you are instantly notified, can assess how significant that impact is, and can take corrective action.
• Analyze the approval of every document within your project because the software automatically tells people when they have items to approve, what they need to do to approve, and when they need to approve. It continually reminds them to approve their items until the digital timer set by your program governance expires, and their items are automatically approved.
• Instantly collaborate with fellow project managers on integration points impacting your SAP projects within the same platform.
• Approve time spent by all resources who are working on your projects down to the work package level and approve expenses at the project level, enabling you to capture the planned effort versus actual effort for every work package to measure what it took to build your work package and then use that intelligence to help better plan future SAP efforts.

An environment where your Business Process Analyst can:

• Create and maintain the approved business process decomposition of your SAP future state operating model down to the lowest procedural transactional level.
• Build the integrated dependencies between detailed processes and sub-processes.
• Assign the defined business roles that will be responsible for executing those business processes and procedures in your future state business model.
• Define each business requirement or business rule that is needed to run your future state business process effectively and efficiently.
• Tie your business processes back to the benefits defined in your business case and the ability to determine how you plan to measure those benefits within your business process.
• Tie your business processes to the myriad of regulatory compliances within your industry and define how your business process definition complies with those regulations.
• Digitally sign off on the work items you produce because you have a platform that automatically tells people when they have items to approve, what they need to do, when they need to approve it, and continually reminds them to approve their items until the digital timer set by your program Governance Office expires and your items are automatically approved for them.
• Manage all aspects of your business process domain from one source of truth where every associated business process data element, design document, risk, issue, action, key decision, change requests, etc., are all connected on one platform. So, when something changes in your SAP initiative that impacts your business process domain, you are instantly notified and can assess how big that impact is going to be and take corrective action.
• Be told everything that they would be responsible, accountable, consulted, and need to be informed throughout your SAP initiative and have the ability to prioritize all the tasks and activities that hit you personally daily that fall outside a formal project plan.

An environment where your functional/technical configuration specialists can:

• Document all your application configurations or programmatic development results related to the functional requirements and business rules defined for a given business process.
• Collaborate with critical team members to walk through your configurations and ensure they meet the business process design and requirements.
• Be instantly notified if changes are made to your business process area from tangential aspects of the program, such as data migration, interfaces, business process design changes, requirement updates, etc., that may impact your configuration or development decisions, and then instantly collaborate with those other teams. So, everyone understands the implications of those changes.
• Automatically tell the right people when they have items to approve, give them work instructions on what they need to do and when they need to approve them, and continually remind them to approve their items until the digital timer set by your program governance office expires. Then, your work items are automatically approved for them.

An environment where your business subject matter experts can:

• Create and curate all documentation work packages within your project. Each work package came with a pre-defined template, plus work instructions and methodology guidance on how to populate that template best. Then, once your documentation is ready, your work package can be sent for digital signature approval to all appropriate resources. If one of those approvers rejects that work package, you can instantly collaborate with all approvers to resolve the issue and get the work package approved.
• Track your time spent on each work package for which you were assigned an effort and the ability to submit documented expenses for each project where you had personal expenses to report.
• Know what you must do daily and the value your contributions are making to the bigger picture of your SAP-driven transformation.
• Know who to talk to about a business process, data element, specific functional requirement, or business rule within your domain.
• Be instantly informed if another team on the other side of the world made changes to aspects of your domain that would significantly impact your scope of work.
• Know everything they were responsible for, accountable for, consulted, and needed to be informed about throughout an SAP initiative. They can prioritize all those tasks and activities that hit you daily and fall outside a formal project plan.

An environment where your Data Migration and Integration Professionals can:

• See the entire data dictionary for each legacy system and future state application impacted by your SAP-driven transformation.
• Perform all the data mappings from the source systems to the target systems for every data migration or systems integration.
• Design all relevancy and transformation rules to ensure that each piece of information moving from one place to another is appropriately defined. Once ready, you could distribute the results for digital signature approval to all appropriate resources. If one of those approvers rejects those results, you could instantly collaborate with all approvers to resolve the issue and get the design approved.
• Define your data governance organization, your data governance roles, processes, policies, and procedures.
• Identify each strategic data element that brings value to your organization and tie those strategic data elements back to your SAP business case and be able to determine how you will measure and track the perpetual value that data will provide to your organization.
• Manage all aspects of your data domain from one source of truth, where every business process design, document, risk issue action, key decision, change request, etc., are all connected on one platform. So, when something changes in another area of your SAP initiative that impacts your data work and data domain, you are instantly notified, and it can assess how significant that impact is and take corrective action.

An environment where your Organizational Change Management Professionals can:

• Define the new job rules for your future state organization and integrate those job roles into your future state business process model.
• Instantly collaborate with security or governance risk and compliance team members to integrate your future state job roles with the design, security profiles, and all appropriate compensating controls in one place, ready to go.
• Manage all communications to all internal and external stakeholders that will be impacted by your SAP initiatives.
• Design, develop, and manage your stakeholder engagement content, as well as address the actions, issues, and key decisions required to transform the hearts and minds of your organization to a new way of doing business in a digital world.
• Build out your integrated benefits realization plan as a mechanism to define the future benefits from your SAP initiatives, to evaluate the benefits and how they will be tied to your business processes and strategic data, and personnel that drives value for your organization.
• Submit and approve the organizational commitment to those benefits, use that commitment to drive change throughout your organization, and then track the actual benefits achieved from your SAP implementations.
• House all training materials for your future state SAP implementations, where your training materials are integrated with each defined business process, job role, and security role within the platform. And then obtain final approval for each critical stakeholder. 
• Integrate your training materials into your future state application so that they are living documents that will be used throughout the lifetime of your application.
• Manage all aspects of your organization’s transformation effort from one source of truth.
• Be instantly notified of changes that impact your work.

An environment where your testing professionals can:

• Build a reusable test library of scenarios, cases, components, and steps that could be applied to a unique test plan to fit every type of test plan needed to validate your future state SAP operating model successfully.
• Automatically assign every business rule defined and improved during design to a specific series of test steps to provide an auditable traceability matrix.
• Build an integrated test plan using the platform’s test plan builder engine.
• Execute test plans using an automation orchestrator to facilitate the execution of your test plans.
• Manage all aspects of your testing effort from one source of truth and be instantly notified when someone impacts your testing efforts.

An environment where your Cutover and Deployment specialist can:

• Build an integrated cutover plan using a Gantt Chart planning tool to build a comprehensive dependency-driven cutover plan and get the necessary stakeholder approval before execution.
• Execute your cutover plan with our plan execution automation orchestrator to facilitate the task handoffs within your cutover plan.
• Document all anomalies during a cutover experience in an integrated cutover journal, thus providing a historical context of the challenges during the mock cutovers and then using those lessons learned to develop corrective action plans to avoid those problems in future cutovers.
• Establish detailed cutover checklists and procedures integrated into your cutover plan and provide the responsible resource with step-by-step instructions and images on executing specific tasks within your cutover execution plans.
• Determine all operational readiness criteria for each aspect of your cutover with
• Clear-cut expectations and resource accountability, then measure that all expectations were met before deploying your SAP implementation.
• Manage the myriad of change requests to your cutover plan through a cutover plan change control mechanism.

An environment where your Hypercare and Production Support Specialists can:

• Appropriately triage and route tickets to and manage your help desk queue.
• Access all the project documentation, decisions made, risks mitigated, and issues resolved in developing your digital product at your fingertips to help you solve a production problem.
• Instantly collaborate with the resources who created the ticket to have further discussions and share screens to understand the problem further and accelerate the resolution.
• Keep all key stakeholders instantly apprised of the resolution status of the Help Desk ticket.
• Evolve your digital product through customer feedback and continual product enhancement, leveraging past learnings and perpetuating the leading practices used to develop it.

This world I speak of is available through our Accelerated Management and Implementation Governance Office, which we call AMIGO™.

AMIGO™ connects every aspect of your transformation journey – from strategic planning and value management to detailed implementation and continuous improvement. We are uniquely positioned to ensure your success with our focus on accelerating delivery, reducing costs and risks, improving ROI, and minimizing implementation pain. Our commitment to providing a single source of truth, enhanced collaboration, and real-time insights will empower your team to make informed decisions and drive meaningful change across your organization. By partnering with us, you can confidently embark on your SAP-Driven Enterprise Transformation, knowing you have a solution and the support you need to achieve your initiative’s goals efficiently and effectively.