3.3    Team Requirements and Timing

Project staffing consists of two categories: the direct project team and the supporting business users and technical team.

When staffing a project team, consider the following:

• Project scope (e.g., finance only, enterprise management, etc.): In general, estimate one project team member (also called a full-time equivalent or FTE) per major functional area (e.g., finance, supply chain, sales and distribution).
• Potential/likely integration requirements: Nonstandard integrations will require development support familiar with writing integrations using APIs and SAP Cloud Platform. A general rule of thumb is to estimate roughly two FTE weeks per integration for development and testing. Additional time may be required for more extensive integrations and for deployment.
• Potential/likely extensions: The staffing and effort for extensions is highly dependent on specific extension requirements and may not be fully known until the extensions are designed. It’s important to note that developers knowledgeable in SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Fiori will be required.
• Data migration: The extent of data being converted, in terms of both functional scope (breadth) and volume (depth), will greatly impact the amount of time and number of project team members required for data migration. At a minimum, the project team will need to include project team members familiar with the data structure in the legacy application to assist with the data extraction and transformation, appropriate functional project team members to assist with the data cleansing, and a project team member on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud side to assist with data transformation and loading using the Migration Cockpit.

This core project team will be supplemented throughout the project by key business users and internal IT staff. The roles for these extended members will include providing functional expertise for the fit-to-standard process, as well as assisting in developing test scripts, piloting training material, and more. Figure 3.20 provides a sample project organization chart.

A note about timelines: Project duration and work effort is highly dependent on too many factors to provide an estimate here. Simple finance-only implementations could take as little as eight to 10 weeks, and more sophisticated enterprise implementations with complex organizations and extensive scope could take four to five months on average. As with project team staffing, the project effort and duration will depend on scope, integrations, extensions, and data migration.

Figure 3.20    Sample Project Organization Chart