Discovering ASAP vs Scrum

Discovering ASAP vs Scrum

SAP is one of the leading ERP providers and market leader. SAP in its effort to reduce the time, and cost of implementations have come up with improvised model of Waterfall and termed it as ASAP (Accelerated SAP). ASAP Project methodology had been a proven Project methodology for SAP ERP implementations worldwide.

Given the changes that technology innovation has brought in, the customer centric focus has increased to deliver functionality of products or projects to the satisfaction of the customers. This has led to the birth of various Agile methods and frameworks. The reasons are very simple that the customers or business users, who do not have any greater visibility of the ERP application functionality are not sure of mapping the business requirements to fix the scope during the initial phase itself.

“Scrum is one of the most sought after Agile Methods for implementing software projects or products” (Cervone, H. F.,2011).  Scrum advocates iterative software model that is modelled by a set of roles, responsibilities, and meetings that continuously exist. Sprints with generally a duration of to two weeks are defined to develop software in an iterative way. 

ASAP and Scrum are two different methodologies with different approach to project delivery. While ASAP follows the sequential waterfall approach Scrum is more oriented towards compressing the entire project management process within short sprint and fewer product features.  However, as we can construe after close observation of these two methodologies the goal is same and that is successful go live and creation of usable application or product.

ASAP will deliver the projects well when the requirements complete and the scope is intact while Scrum is more adaptable when the requirements are not clear or still evolving. The close examination of these two methodologies in line with PMBOK knowledge areas, will give us insight that the nine knowledge areas or intertwined with the project processes itself with major focus on end goal. While ASAP has closer relation with PMBOK Knowledge areas that are abridged within six phases, Scrum has these covered as a shorter version within a sprint.