PeopleSoft FSCM 9.1 Upgrade Templates Now Available
Oracle has just recently posted the FSCM 9.1 upgrade templates. For those of you on My Oracle Support the new templates and related documentation can be found by performing these knowledge searches:
“FSCM 9.1 Upgrade” – PeopleSoft Enterprise Finance and Supply Chain 9.1 Upgrade Pages for 8.8, 8.9, and 9.0
“9.1 Documentation Home” – FMS, ESA, & ALM 9.1 Documentation Home Page
“8.50 Documentation Home” – PeopleTools 8.50 Documentation Home Page
FCMS PeopleBooks can be downloaded at the Oracle technology PeopleSoft Enterprise site.
Please stay tuned for many more postings on the subject of 9.1 upgrades.
The coming Talent Storm. Are you ready?
A talent storm could be brewing in your organization. The clouds may be gathering just over the horizon. There are several studies and articles that have recently come across the wires that incorporate some form of this critical warning: Retain and attract talent or risk being left behind as the world recovers.
In December 2009 a study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by StepStone Solutions found some very troubled waters indeed. Those closest to the workforce are warning that the most talented are not fully engaged in their work yet those at the very top have not yet realized that fact.
A summary of this new report – Companies at the Crossroads which surveyed executives spread over three continents – can be found here. The full version is available at www.stepstonesolutions.com/eiu. Here are a some statistical findings from the report:
- 41% of respondents agreed they have a shortage of talent in their organization
- 44% agreed they find it increasingly difficult to recruit talented employees
- One respondent in two plans to ramp up recruitment over the coming year; only 18% still plan to reduce or freeze headcounts
- Only 16% of line managers said that staff were fully engaged with the business, yet this is not recognised in many boardrooms, with 38% of CEOs saying that trust is ‘high’.
- The top three priorities for talent investments for 2010 are:
- Performance management (voiced by 46% of respondents)
- Leadership development (41%)
- Training and development (36%)
How can you get ready? There are many ways that you can tackle the coming talent storm. Some are strategic. Some are organizational. Some require new policies & procedures for retaining and attracting talent. And some will require better technology.
One new technology worth considering is PeopleSoft HCM 9.1’s talent management product. A previous posting entitled Managing Talent Mismatches covers some of the more useful talent management features incorporated into the current release. Maybe it is a time to take a closer look before the coming talent storm dampens your organization’s prospects for success.
PeopleSoft 9.1 Upgrade Insights: Got a strategy?
Many may think they have an upgrade strategy and do not. Others may believe they do not need a strategy, just the upgrade scripts.
Perhaps, some believe it is all about tactics. What constitutes a strategy? What is a tactic?
A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.
Strategy is profoundly different from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy.
My recommendation is develop an upgrade strategy tailored to your organization AND then shout it out so everyone touched by your project knows what it is.
Identify your true and actual goal(s). Upgrading is not a goal. It is a process. A goal is something like: Improve our operations by leveraging new functionality including HCM 9.1’s new robust time & labor entry approval process.
Portray outcome(s) that leave no real doubt that your goals been achieved: Employees will be able to view and print their paystubs using the HCM 9.1 internet portal.
Define your scope in a way that not only describes what is IN the project but what is to be left OUT: Benefit Administration will NOT be configured and deployed.
Portray your project methodology in a straightforward manner so that everyone involved understands how you plan to get from point A to point Z. The first step on the path to understanding is what I like to call the 25 words or less test. For instance: Install the latest and greatest release, upgrade our current system to the new release, and test exhaustively until all features and functions are working properly. See, 25 words exactly.
Of course, we have always carved up large, comprehensive projects into understandable and manageable phases. An upgrade project is no exception:
- Prepare & Install- You cannot upgrade if you cannot install. And you cannot install unless you have a technical environment that supports the new release.
- Upgrade- Start with the new release and your current system. End up with a version of your system upgraded to the level of the new 9.1 release that can be verified and tested.
- Test- I like to call this the “Make it Work” phase. Keep testing it, keep fixing it until it works.
- Deploy & Support- Some project managers like to start at the beginning and work forward. I like to start at the end and work backwards. What is needed for a successful cutover? If the project plan does not include a realistic answer to this question then failure will be the likely result.
In upcoming postings, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights, I will discuss how a variety of time tested techniques can be employed to jumpstart, monitor, and control the upgrade process. Stay tuned.
PeopleSoft 9.1: Practical Improvements– Managing Talent Mismatches
Talent Shortages you say. What are you crazy? Don’t you know that the unemployment rate is 9.7%? We can get anybody we want with any skill we need anytime, anywhere. It is just “common knowledge.”
Most Human Resource professionals already know or will soon come to find out that following “common knowledge” is just too precarious. In fact, a serious case of “Talent Mismatch” is just over the horizon. Manpower Inc’s recent workforce study identifies four megatrends, the first is:
The Talent Mismatch is deepening as the working age population declines and the nature of work changes. These significant shifts in talent supply are transforming the global labor market.
The new HCM 9.1 release cites this mega trend as the impetus for many new features and functions. Succession Planning was one area that received a lot of attention. This module was fundamentally re-developed to become a tool for managing the skills, talent, and leadership blend within your organization.
As much as I hate to use a sports analogy I will do so now. The Saints just won the super bowl. But would they have done so if players had been acquired without consideration to position or skills? A talent mismatch in just a few positions – what if the left tackle was a 200 pounder with slow feet and small hands – would have spelled disaster instead of success.
The new succession planning module not only lets you appraise your short, medium, and long term talent needs but also showcases some new and useful Oracle technologies.
I like these three Talent Management features:
- Talent Pools - Most organizations need many disparate talents to be successful. Who has those talents in your organization? How many do you have? Creating talent pools (engineering, marketing, sales, accounting, finance, and more) provides a strong framework for tracking, managing, and more importantly reaping the benefits of your organization’s most skilled employees.
- Rating Boxes - You have established your talent pools. You have populated those pools with top talent. Are your pools deep or are they dangerously shallow? There is not necessarily safety in numbers. Two high potential high performers may be far better than ten workers who have demonstrated that they are not highly engaged in their field.
A Succession Planning rating box – High potential vs. High performance – will force you to evaluate your talent. If all your people land in the lowest left hand quadrant you definitely have a bad problem. If you have too many in the upper right hand quadrant you may have a good problem.
- Succession 360 -S360 is talent control at a glance. My steering wheel has an info button. I click it and it tells me many things I need to know such as how many miles I can drive before I run out of gas.S360 offers similar information. If setup properly it could tell you how many weeks, months, or years before you run out of talent.
The world’s largest and most productive generation is nearing the final stages of their careers. Even in a bad economy how long do you think they will be able to hold on? Not forever be assured.
Further, the new technology is very impressive: independently refreshed frames, easily collapsible grids, and, of course, drag and drop. I have been dragging and dropping outside of the PeopleSoft realm for many years. Now I will be able to drag and drop succession candidates from one rating box quadrant to another. The Succession 360 component is definitely a technical harbinger of things to come.
Please stay tuned for the next posting in my series – PeopleSoft 9.1: Practical Improvements.
When a trend line falls below 4% it is no longer a trend. It is a fact.
In the technology sector only about 4% of the workforce is highly engaged. IT job satisfaction plummets to all time low.
The CEB’s latest survey found that the willingness of IT employees to “exert high levels of discretionary effort” — put in extra hours to solve a problem, make suggestions for improving processes, and generally seek to play a key role in an organization — has plummeted to its lowest levels since the survey was launched 10 years ago.
In 2007, about 12% of the IT employees fit in category of “highly engaged” workers, but that has since fallen to 4%.
Buying a car? Having a heart operation? Purchasing a ticket for a NBA game? If you discovered that only 4% of the Auto Company’s employees were highly engaged in what they were producing would you still buy that car? If you found out that only 4% of heart surgeons were highly engaged in what they were doing would you then be very, very careful in choosing a doctor? If only 4% of your local basketball team was highly engaged –it works out to be only one player highly motivated to play about ½ the time– would you actually buy that ticket? For most of us the answer would be resounding No.
Why then does this ultra-low statistic (in the real world 4% is about as close to zero as it can be) seem to generate so little concern? I wish I had an answer but I just don’t. However, I can tell you that this situation does remind me of the sub-prime housing market a year before the big crash. If this figure of 4% remains unaltered be prepared to read very soon about big catastrophes resulting from faulty software, hardware, or some combination thereof.
There are many factors — long hours, cuts in pay, few growth opportunities, little or no recognition of work well done—that over time have contributed to this malaise.
How can the industry begin to pull out of this tailspin? Identify the most experienced people on your staff. If you do not have a sufficient level of experienced people internally then seek well seasoned veterans from the outside. Compensate these people what they are worth. Craft challenging opportunities. Recognize their contributions. Start creating your highly engaged workforce now before it is too late. When a trend line falls below 4% it is no longer a trend. It is a fact.
PeopleSoft 9.1 Upgrade Insights: Top Ten Technical Items
There is not enough room here to list in detail all the technical tasks required for a successful upgrade. Nevertheless, getting the large things right can make it a lot easier to get the small things right. So here goes. I have reviewed all the technical checklists from my prior upgrade experiences and gleaned my top ten items. I will try to be short and sweet.
Being as yet an imperfect human being I may have left some items out or included some items with which you may take issue. Feel free to suggest additional items or critisize those I have listed:
- Chart your production environment- I am a big believer in working backwards. If you don’t know what the final result is supposed to look like it makes it very difficult to achieve that result. Where is your new 9.1 application going to reside? (Remember Oracle has only certified 64-bit OS’s) How much space will be required? How many websites will be needed?
- Design your upgrade environment- Where are you going to install, re-develop, and test your upgraded 9.1 applications?
- Prepare to create many new databases- PeopleSoft upgrades require a lot of new databases. Most of these databases will be, it is sad to say, full sized versions of your production database. Here is a typical list.
- Installed 9.1 demo
- Updated 9.1 demo (PeopleTools fixes, Application packs, Tax releases, and more)
- Upgrade database (Upgrade copy target)
- Development and Testing database (Copy of Upgrade)
- System testing Database (Product of 1st/2nd Move to Production process)
- UAT/Parallel Database (Product of 3rd Move to Production process)
- Production Database (Product of Final Move to Production process)
- Get the horses- You have charted your production environment. You have designed your upgrade and testing environment. You have determined the number and type databases needed. Now you have to ask yourself. Do I have the horsepower to get the job done? If not, it may be time to pony up (just a little bit sorry for the bad pun) the capital and get the hardware and software required for a successful upgrade.
- Create new web addresses- Let’s stay that your current HCM power user web address is http://psft.mycompany.com. There is a lot of technical infrastructure, procedures, and user productivity built around that web address. It is best not to disrupt your production systems until the very last moment possible. I have always pressed for new web addresses as the safest and easiest way to cutover to the new release. It may be useful to try something like this: http://psft91.mycompany.com.
- Respect the new Integration Broker- Get the new SOA IB up and working as soon as you can. The IB is a technically complex entity and may require some significant effort to master. Also, there is lot of important functionality dependent on the IB (e.g.HCM applicant hires) that should be put to bed sooner rather than later.
- Fire up the Change Agent- The Change Agent (CA) is the primary tool for upgrading your system to the new release. It is imperative that someone on your team become an expert in setting up, operating, and validating the CA.
- Consider user security early- A long time ago in a far off land there was an upgrade project team that left security on the back burner until just prior to cutover weekend. It was at that point that they discovered that userids and passwords are part of the PeopleTools upgrade (done months before in the intial upgrade) and not included in the final move to production.
- Roles, Permission Lists, and the like- Beware. Your security roles and permission lists will probably not transfer well to the new release. You may need to manually re-do much of your security structure. You know. The security structure designed by that guy look ago whose name nobody remembers but who everyone remembers constantly complained about being the one responsible for this despicable job. If so, perhaps, your current security structure is not so good. The good news is that this may be a very good time start anew and implement the better security struture for your organization.
- Setup system communications- One of the things that PeopleSoft systems love to do most is communicate. Most often these communications take the form of eMail messages, lots of eMail messages. Most organizations have one and only one email system so it is important to ensure that your upgraded test systems do not get in the habit of sending action messages to everyday workers. It may be a career limiting move (CLM) if one of your high level managers were to lose access to medical benefits because the “deceased” workflow processes were being tested.
In upcoming postings, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights, I will discuss how a variety of time tested techniques can be employed to jumpstart, monitor, and control the upgrade process. Stay tuned.
PeopleSoft 9.1 Upgrade Insights: The Checklist Manifesto
The world is getting more complex and so are PeopleSoft upgrades. This upcoming PeopleSoft 9.1 upgrade may well be the most complex upgrade many customers have ever attempted.
For example, Oracle has introduced a multitude of technical changes since PeopleTools 8.47. All one needs to do is take a look at the Integration Broker (IB) to find radical differences. The preferred technology was “Application Messaging”. Now it is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) In HRMS 9.1 the SOP for hiring an applicant is through the Integration Broker.
How can you cope with the complexity of your upgrade project? Atul Gawande provides a straightforward yet important suggestion in his book: The Checklist Manifesto. This recent book is based on an article M. Gawande wrote for the New Yorker entitled The Checklist: If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?
Here, then, is the puzzle of I.C.U. care: you have a desperately sick patient, and in order to have a chance of saving him you have to make sure that a hundred and seventy-eight daily tasks are done right—despite some monitor’s alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady’s chest open.” So how do you actually manage all this complexity?
Sound familiar? You have to keep your upgrade project on track and avoid taking one or possibly even two steps backwards for each step forward. Your current labor distributions are out of balance with your payroll. Your test website is going down “for no reason.” You are trying to conduct fit/gap sessions but your most important end-user is in Belgium all week. How do you cope with this complexity?
The solution suggested by M. Gawande to this quandary is basic and simple: The Checklist.
An upgrade project requires many checklists. Here are a just a few I have employed successfully in the past:
- Technical checklists – both general and detailed
- Open Issues including who is accountable for resolving
- New Development projects with timeframes and accountability
- PeopleSoft objects – re-Development items with specific assignments
- Security checklists
In the next part of this series, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights, I will discuss how to use various checklists to jumpstart, monitor, and control the upgrade process. Stay tuned.
PeopleTools 8.50 and Windows 7
The PeopleSoft Tipster blog site has posted some very good information about apparent incompatibilities between the Windows 7 operating system and PeopleTools 8.50.
The signon page says that Windows 7 is not supported but there may be a workaround.
Click here for more information.
Talent Mismatch: Mega Trend
Finding the right talent is not going to get easier. In fact, in the near future it will become increasingly difficult to match the advanced needs of your organization with the talent available in the global marketplace. That is one of the workforce mega trends identified in Manpower Inc.’s new research study: Four Mega Trends That Are Transforming and Accelerating the Way the World Works.
“The Talent Mismatch is deepening as the working age population declines and the nature of work changes. These significant shifts in talent supply are transforming the global labor market.”
Plan for the future. Planning for the present or the past is by definition a waste of time. Today, unemployment in America is high. But are these unemployed workers necessary the highly skilled people you will need to be successful as the recovery gathers steam? Probably not.
“”As the economy rebounds, companies will need to prepare for a new normal, carefully adjusting their business strategy and evaluating their workforce,” said Joerres. “In the past, access to capital gave companies their edge; soon talent will become the competitive differentiator and companies will compete for talent as rigorously as individuals now compete for jobs.”
There were four mega trends identified in this study. I will only mention one more: Individual Choice. Those with the most desirable skills will have the most choice. This fact will require organizations to re-think how jobs should be structured in order to attract and retain hard-to-find talent.
A official summary of the study can be downloaded here.
PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights: Fit/Gap (Part 3 of 3)
Many customers are now installing one or more of the new PeopleSoft 9.1 releases. Oracle has released the upgrade scripts and, as the famous detective Sherlock Holmes would have likely said, “the game is afoot” . PeopleSoft upgrade projects may be complex but they don’t necessarily have to be full of mystery and suspense. A little knowledge can go a long way.
This seems like a particularly good time to share some PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights starting with the subject of Fit/Gaps. Staying with the same body part metaphor I can say that getting your upgrade project “started on the right foot” is absolutely critical. And you can’t get it started right without executing a successful Fit/Gap. This is the last of three postings describing how you can obtain the maximum benefit out of your Fit/Gap process.
In my last posting, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights: Fit/Gap (Part 2 of 3), I talked about how to conduct your Fit/Gap sessions and gather information in an organized and efficient manner. You have created a nice, long list of issues. Now what do you do?
How do you turn all this raw data into useful information that will jumpstart your next phase and set your project on a solid path to success?
- Research and resolve – The main purpose of the Fit/Gap sessions were to identify issues, not resolve them. Your rules were that if it could not be resolved in 10 minutes or less then you would address it later. Well, “later” has now arrived. Maybe, it requires a follow-up meeting with selected individuals. Perhaps, a technical review is needed. One way or another a resolution for each item needs to be generated. One of my favorite resolutions is to do nothing.
- Mind the Gaps – Many issues were recorded in the Fit/Gap sessions. Are they all gaps in functionality? Likely not. I classify them in three ways.
- FIT - The delivered function meets 100% of the requirement. Nevertheless, some level of end user community and/or IT effort may be required to use effectively.
- GAP - The delivered functionality does not address a particular requirement. If the requirement is to be met alternative methods must be developed.
- PARTIAL FIT - The delivered functionally does not meet 100% of the requirement. If the requirement is to be fully met alternative methods must be developed. These methods may involve internal/external workarounds, changes in current processes, modifications to delivered components, and/or development of new components & programs.
Pay particular attention to partial fits. These may be the best opportunities for reengineering.
- Is it important? – The gap may be obvious but perhaps it is not important. Prioritize your list.
- 1-High Importance
- 2-Medium Importance
- 3-Low Importance
- 4-Research Item
- Is it worth it? – Several significant gaps have been identified. Should you fill them? How much time will it take and, more importantly, whose time are we talking about. Information Technology (IT) is not always the biggest player. Often, substantial effort is required on the functional side. I divide the estimates into two columns: IT effort and Process effort for the functional departments. Here is a sizing scheme the seems to get good support from IT and end-users alike.
- None
- Very Low – 1 day or less
- Low – 1 week or less
- Medium – 1 to 2 weeks
- Large – 2 to 4 weeks
- Very Large – 1 to 3 Months
- Sort, filter, slice, and dice – Your list of issues has been researched, classified, prioritized, and estimated. Now you can force the cream to the top. Which are your most important issues? Which items will take the greatest IT effort? Will a large amount of user effort be required? All these questions and more can be addressed by manipulating your list.
In the next part of this series, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights, I will discuss how to use your updated list of items to jumpstart the re-development process. Stay tuned.