Team Topology for SAP AMS: Fewer Handovers, Faster Fixes

{
  "id": "ams-011",
  "title": "Team Topology for SAP AMS: Fewer Handovers, Faster Fixes",
  "hook": "Most SAP AMS slowness is not technical. It’s organizational latency: handovers, unclear ownership, and ‘not my module’.",
  "idea": "A modern AMS team is shaped around business flows and failure modes, not around old module silos. The goal is to compress the path from symptom → owner → fix.",
  "sap_specific_truth": {
    "why_silos_fail": [
      "OTC breaks due to pricing, credit, output, IDocs, and roles — not just SD.",
      "P2P failures mix MM, FI, tax, interfaces, workflow, and master data.",
      "MDG issues look like ‘data’, but fail in mappings, replication, or downstream validation."
    ],
    "consequence": "If you route by module, you route wrong half the time."
  },
  "recommended_topology": {
    "pods": [
      {
        "name": "Flow Pod: OTC",
        "owns": [
          "Order-to-cash failures and prevention",
          "Critical outputs (billing, EDI, prints)",
          "Cross-domain coordination when OTC is impacted"
        ]
      },
      {
        "name": "Flow Pod: P2P",
        "owns": [
          "Procure-to-pay failures and prevention",
          "Invoice posting stability",
          "Supplier integration and operational SLAs"
        ]
      },
      {
        "name": "Data Pod: MDM/MDG + Quality",
        "owns": [
          "Master data correctness and replication health",
          "Value mappings and governance for LoVs",
          "Data gates that prevent bad inputs from entering the core"
        ]
      },
      {
        "name": "Reliability Pod: Integrations + Monitoring",
        "owns": [
          "Interface contracts, error handling, retries",
          "Signals, alerting, runbooks",
          "Queue/backlog health as a first-class product"
        ]
      },
      {
        "name": "Enablement Pod: Automation + Standard Changes",
        "owns": [
          "Standard change catalog",
          "Self-service flows, templates, bots",
          "AI copilots, KB, and playbook quality"
        ]
      }
    ],
    "shared_services": [
      "Basis/Platform (performance, availability, transports pipeline)",
      "Security/Authorizations (SoD-aware fast lane)",
      "Engineering bench (ABAP/BTP/integration dev as needed)"
    ]
  },
  "ownership_rules": [
    "Every business-critical incident has one accountable owner from start to finish — no ping-pong.",
    "If multiple domains are involved, the impacted flow pod owns coordination.",
    "Escalation without evidence is rejected (politely) and returned with a data checklist."
  ],
  "handover_minimization": {
    "mechanisms": [
      "Single chat thread as the source of truth (timeline, evidence, actions).",
      "Routing based on symptom clusters and flow impact, not on ticket category.",
      "Runbooks that define first 10 minutes: checks, signals, and decisions."
    ],
    "goal": "One handover maximum before a real owner starts working."
  },
  "cadence": {
    "daily": [
      "Triage: choose owner + next action + next update time",
      "Fast lane review: approve standard changes quickly"
    ],
    "weekly": [
      "Top repeats: pick 3 load-killers to eliminate",
      "Monitoring review: signals that failed to detect issues"
    ],
    "monthly": [
      "Scorecard: stability, cost-to-serve, prevention progress",
      "Backlog reset: stop low-value work explicitly"
    ]
  },
  "skills_mix": {
    "needed": [
      "Functional depth in flows (OTC/P2P/RTR)",
      "Integration literacy (queues, retries, mapping contracts)",
      "Data quality mindset (validation, replication, governance)",
      "Engineering hygiene (tests, rollback, observability)",
      "Communication discipline (clear updates, no fog)"
    ],
    "avoid": [
      "Only module specialists with no cross-flow understanding",
      "People who fix but never prevent",
      "Hero culture"
    ]
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Suggest the right pod based on symptom patterns and impacted flow.",
      "Detect cross-domain collisions early (e.g., auth + integration + data).",
      "Auto-create a timeline and ensure required evidence is present."
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "Owner recommendation + confidence",
      "Missing evidence checklist",
      "Runbook attachment for the first-response window"
    ]
  },
  "metrics_that_expose_org_latency": [
    "Handovers per incident",
    "Time-to-owner (first accountable owner assigned)",
    "Escalations rejected due to missing data (%)",
    "Incidents reopened due to wrong routing (%)"
  ],
  "anti_patterns_to_kill": [
    "Routing by module name in the short description",
    "‘Not my area’ as an operating principle",
    "Meetings as the default coordination mechanism"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "How many minutes do we lose before the right person even starts thinking?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-011.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-011.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "Most SAP AMS slowness is not technical. It’s organizational latency: handovers, unclear ownership, and ‘not my module’."
  }
}