The most important document for SAP lifecycle that is always overlooked

I worked for one well-known global financial institute. The business process and system landscape were complicated which is typical for the industry. Instead of working on value added tasks, people ended up spending time everyday re-defining responsibility boundaries, re-discussing points that were already agreed weeks ago, and doing a new round of local business process exploration for every initiatives received from the HQ. 
 

Don’t be surprised and actually it is a fairly common situation. For the 15+ SAP implementations over 10 industries across 9 countries that I was involved, be it brand new or established system, only one implementation has a live business process document that solves the issue.
 

A live business process document helps the effectiveness and efficient in a SAP environment by:

• Eliminates the temptation to understand a business from looking at technical customisation / documentation.

• Serves as an ongoing mutual agreement on the scope of the supported business processes and avoid ambiguity.

• Set a common ground for trouble shooting and solid foundation in building enhancement.

• Saves time to on-board new members and make them productive ASAP.

• Prevent people from making uninformed decision.

To make sure the document does not become obsolete, it must be checked if a revision is required every time there is a business / system process change. It takes a lot of persistence to guarantee the document is updated as needed. I would guess this is the reason why out of the 15 implementations, there is only one live document. It is always important to balance the level of detail and the content of the document to get the most out of the investment.