Resource planning

Wed Jan 16 06:28:09 EST 2008

<sigh> I just told you I wouldn't so much as whisper an estimate without
about a month's research. 

Not even a day later you have a proposal. A proposal that ignores the
majority of what I said before.  

I take back my statement about suggesting you get an Experienced consultant
in. 

Instead, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND you get an EXPERIENCED consultant to help you
out. 

Planning is not a game. It has a far bigger influence on cost and success
than the build itself (which should take up less than half the time). SAP
only charge a couple of thousand dollars per day. I say "only" because
they'll save you tens of thousands (If you listen to them of course). How
so? By not having to scrap or redo parts of a badly planned project, never
mind the damage to your reputation. 

How do I know it's already badly planned? See first two sentences of this
email. 

Please understand that I'm not having a go at you, but your two posts make
it clear that you need a reality check. Not giving you an answer is the most
helpful we can be. Anyone that gives you estimates on this list will do more
harm than good because they will probably be wrong (Ask on SDN and you will
get plenty of those).

Even though the WUG ranks just behind Wikipedia in knowledge content, there
are just too many factors to do this with the help of a mailing list. Feel
free to ask about specifics as you work your way through requirements
gathering. 

Good luck, 

Mike

PS: Your use of the word 'empirical' is the exact opposite of its meaning.
Your values are certainly not based on facts and observation. 

From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of
Srinivasan Ramanan
Sent: 15 January 2008 15:01
To: SAP Workflow Users' Group
Subject: RE: Resource planning

Thanks Mike,
I appreciate your inputs. Its really difficult to answer this question. 
What I did is: ( Since I am in the position to answer this to my company as
an employee of the company )
I assumed these followings:
              10 complex workflows ( having more than 20 tasks )
              30 medium                 ( 10 to 20 tasks )
              60 simple                    ( less than 10 tasks )

It is decided to implement HR just for Organizational units purposes. It
helps both roles and authorization management. Hence agent assignments could
be not that complex.

Having a time line of 6 months only for these work, I am proposing:
                6 Personnels for development over  six months period
                4 to 6 Personnels for maintain and administer - for support
after go live

Has anyone else could share some ideas if you have executed projects even
not to this magnitude, but with some 10 - 20 workflows development. I need
some info on how many personnels, how many workflows and how many months. It
will be kind of easy to extrapolate. I do understand that it will only be an
empirical value for resource planning. But we can start with min. resource
and continue to agument as and when the workflows start  development phase.

regards
Ramanan

  _____  

From: asap at workflowconnections.com
To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: RE: Resource planning
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:08:07 +0000

Hello Ramanan, 

That's a pretty major project, and there is a good reason all projects go
through a planning phase. Faced with the same question I would estimate at
least a month's work to come up with an answer that's anywhere near
realistic. 

For starters there are many factors beyond workflow that will influence your
requirements, such as size and makeup of the overall project team, length of
project, willingness to invest in the right skills. Are you going to employ
4+ years' experienced consultants, or find ABAPers who have built the
occasional WF, or train up inhouse staff? 

Next you have the workflows themselves. I've built approval workflows taking
from two days to over a year. Even specific workflow scenarios are no
measure: an invoice approval can take 10 days at one client and 5 months at
another (also based on personal experience). 

You ask how many administrators? What sort of total volumes do you expect?
(You obviously need to volume estimates of each of the workflows..). Do you
use HR? More experienced resources building the WFs will pay off in reduced
maintenance. The workflow I mentioned above created jobs for two
administrators - just looking after the one WF.

Based on the info in your question, I would seriously suggest you engage an
Experienced (with a capital 'E') consultant for at least a few days to get
you started on answering it. 

If you insist on a guess: 50% chance you need between 5 and 10 people, 50%
chance you need more or less than that. Flip a coin to see which one. 

Cheers, 

Mike

From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of
Srinivasan Ramanan
Sent: 14 January 2008 21:58
To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: Resource planning

Dear WUG,
There are 100 workflows expected to be up and running in ECC6.0
Please consider that it is not know exactly what are the workflows now.
But please consider that workflows will be used for create and maintain of
all major master data objects and pretty much for regular task distributions
like PO release, invoice processing etc.,

My questions are:

How many personnels are required at the Development phase for these 100
workflows?

How may personnels are required for 'maintain' and 'administer' the
workflows? 

Anyone who worked at this level, please I value your inputs very much.
Please respond with your experiences and emprical calculations.

thanks in advance.
Ramanan

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