Best Practices for SAP SuccessFactors Release Management

Modified on Wed, 29 May at 4:03 PM

One of the advantages of owning a cloud solution is ensuring that your system is on the newest and greatest solution. With SAP SuccessFactors, their bi-annual releases are most times packed with new features and functionalities. These releases, many times, have the potential to impact legacy configuration of a customer’s current SAP SuccessFactors system, below are various identified best practices for SAP SuccessFactors release management.

Between releases to preview and production systems, there is a month-long window. Proper identification of support team staff and proper allocation of key resources is key. Effective planning and communication with staff is paramount in ensuring a smooth release cycle.

Customers may not want to enable everything within a new release. Some of these features may not be the right fit [least at the current time] for your organization or it may negatively impact your configuration.

Here are some key points to consider:

Be sure to validate why you do [or do not] want to enable a certain feature.
Eventually it is likely you will have to move to the newest release, time depends on the functionality and SAP roadmap.
Leverage resources that are available to you

SAP SuccessFactors has many online user groups and communities where you can connect with others. During releases, this can be very beneficial to discuss with other organizations who could be experiencing similar situations to you. This can be access though the SAP Community.

Of course, with releases, testing is critical. Test, test, test, it is the most critical are to see how the release impacts your configuration before it hits production. Not only that but there are bugs that can occur within the system from releases. In some areas of SuccessFactors, there could be issues that would not be addressed until the mid-year release and then resolved at the year-end release.

Additional information from SAP on release schedules, known issues and roadmap can be found at SAP Community - Product Release & Road Map Information.