Time Management in SAP: How to Protect the Schedule Across Projects and Operations
By Miguel Santos | SAP Advisory & Technical Writing · Time, Focus & Priorities
It’s 9:05 a.m. An SAP project team has set aside the first hour of the day to prepare for user acceptance testing. Then Operations reports that several invoices haven’t been issued. There’s a project meeting at 10, and by noon key users need to know whether tomorrow’s test session will go ahead.
Two questions help the team decide what to do next. What would be the impact of delaying each commitment by an hour? Who needs to know if the plan changes?
1. Plan backward from the next milestone
If user acceptance testing starts on Thursday, start with what has to be ready by then. When must the test data be loaded? Who confirms access? By when do key users need to hear that a scenario is blocked?
Use the same approach in operations. Ahead of month-end close or a payment run, set aside time for checks and agree who will be available if something fails. On Monday, pick up to three outcomes that other teams are counting on. Give each one an owner, a deadline and a checkpoint. Resolve conflicts over shared specialists while there’s still room to move things around.
2. Give every time block a concrete outcome
Replace “Work on data migration” with “Validate supplier data and list the test scenarios still blocked.” The second version tells the test team what to expect at the end of the hour.
For ongoing support, a block might read “Compare this week’s billing errors and identify one possible cause to test.” Schedule analytical work when interruptions are less likely. If there’s a support rotation, agree who will triage incoming incidents and how they’ll reach the specialist if needed.
3. Assess the impact before changing the schedule
A billing outage and an isolated error with a workaround can arrive through the same channel, both marked “urgent.” Confirm which business process is affected, who is blocked and how long the business can wait. Use the agreed service levels to guide the response.
If the incident needs immediate attention, decide what happens to the work it displaces. Reassign it, narrow its scope or reschedule it. Tell anyone waiting for the result early enough for them to adjust their own plans.
4. Give meetings a decision to make
Replace “UAT status update” with “Decide whether to move scenarios with missing data to Friday.” In operations, “Decide whether the invoices can be reprocessed today” makes it easier to identify who should attend and what they need to bring.
When the purpose is to share progress, a written update may be enough. When a decision is needed, record what was agreed, who owns the next action and when it’s due.
5. Leave room for fixes and retesting
A test week filled with first runs leaves little room to investigate defects and rerun scenarios. A support week filled with tickets leaves little room to find out why the same issue keeps coming back. Reserve time for both before the week fills up.
When an incident uses that margin, make the trade-off explicit.
“Billing needs attention now. Can someone else validate the test data this morning? If nobody is available, let’s tell Procurement now so they can reschedule the session.”
At the next weekly review, reserve one block for work another team is counting on and another to investigate a recurring problem. On Friday, check whether those blocks held. If either slipped, look at what took its place before planning the following week.
“Lost time is never found again.”
Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth