How to effectively document changes to roles?

Question

Hey Folks,
We are looking for a way to capture the changes in the roles as part of projects and defects.
We are considering the approach through storing the information in tables AGR_1251 ,AGR_TCODES, AGR_1252 and AGR_DEFINE  in an excel sheet .But this is a cumbersome approach ..
Can people share how changes to the roles documented in their systems?
Raji

Answer 1

Raj,
There are several ways to due this however you may want take a look at the different approaches and then form your standard based on the requirements you need.
Personally I'm not a big fan of tracking role changes in spreadsheets.  As you state it is very cumbersome and it will it may become out of sync with what is actually in the role--depending on how it's maintained.
One approach is to define a documentation requirement directly in the role itself. 
Add a new line to the long text role description on the description tab of the role every time a change is made to the role.
The is line may look similar to the following:
Date, (change request/ticket number), identifier of project or defect, description of change
Example:
04/03/2007   123456  Project    Add tcode SU10 to security admin role
This information can then be extracted from the AGR_TEXTS table for reporting.
Cheers,
Ben