Save money on your PeopleSoft upgrade – Do not allow weak Skillsets to sink your project
The best way to save money on your upgrade is to do things right the first time. Being wrong is expensive. 
In this posting and in the series to follow I will recommend ways to say money on your upgrade and improve your chances of success at the same time.
There I was all by myself sitting at a long table (..on deck as it were..) being asked detailed questions about how I planned to manage a complex PeopleSoft upgrade project. In those days it was not unusual for me to be in a position like this. I had already spent more than a decade running complicated implementation and upgrade projects. What was unusual was the timing. This session was occurring before the contract was awarded; before I or anyone else from my consulting firm had been officially assigned. Later I discovered that this client had scheduled, immediately preceding the selection of a vendor, similar sessions with each of the finalists. They felt a strong need to assess before they made the final decision the individuals who were going to be assigned to their project and whether those individuals had sufficient skillsets to get the job done.
My third recommendation for saving money: Carefully assess what each and every external resource can really do. Not what the sales person says that resource can do. Not what a generic resume indicates that resource can do. What that external resource can really do.
Make your outsider vendor name names. Which specific workers will be assigned? Interview those in whom you may have doubts. What skills do they currently possess? What knowledge gaps exist? Should the vendor provide training prior to the start date? Often, however, a long track record of success is more important that possession of a single piece of current knowledge. A technical architect who has created and managed PeopleTools 8.46, 8.47, 8.49 environments over a period of years is going to be more valuable than a gaggle of neophytes whose only qualifications are that they recently attended a PeopleTools 8.50 workshop.
Naturally, having been in the business for a long time I have experienced the best and worst of the skills conflict. I have seen clients who wanted little or no involvement in staffing their projects. On the other hand, I have seen clients who were extraordinarily involved in the selection of project members. I can tell you that these heavily involved clients tended to experience fewer problems, meet more milestones, and complete their projects more rapidly.
Just in case anyone was worried or curious my consulting firm did get the job and I was assigned to manage the project…and, yes, it did get completed successfully.
Stay tuned for more postings in the series, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights
Save money on your PeopleSoft upgrade – Find out what your Insiders can do
The best way to save money on your upgrade is to do things right the first time. Being wrong is expensive. 
In this posting and in the series to follow I will recommend ways to save money on your upgrade and improve your chances of success at the same time.
Raoul (an internal employee and not his real name) was fixing something, yet again, that an outside technical consultant had done wrong. Raoul had other PeopleSoft technical responsibilities but the upgrade was the department’s highest priority project and, by the way, the project was on a very tight schedule. I remember asking Raoul why he was not doing the work that the outside consultant was doing. His answer; Nobody ever asked me about what I could do.
In this age of outsourcing, exclusive vendor contracting, and rampant delegation to organizational outsiders the true cost of getting things done too often gets lost. If a person in your household can cut the grass or paint a wall then paying an outsider to do those jobs is a waste of money. If people inside your organization can make the Integration Broker (IB) run smoothly, setup Recruiting Solutions, or create XML Publisher reports then paying outside entities to do these jobs can cost your organization considerable money.
My second recommendation for saving money: Carefully assess what your internal people can do. Interview your staff. What skills do they currently possess? What knowledge gaps exist? How much training would be required to close those gaps?
Align your talent assessment with the resource plans embodied in your overall upgrade plan. What kind of recourses do you need and when do you need them? Perhaps, you require project management and functional Fit/Gap talent right away but can wait a while for your technical staff to get up to speed
Define the most cost effective talent mix for your project. Of course, if you haven’t found out what you currently have then you can’t expect to efficiently fill the difference between what you have and what you will need to successfully complete your upgrade.
Stay tuned for more postings in the series, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights
PeopleSoft 9.1: Saving money on your upgrade
The best way to save money on your upgrade is to do things right the first time. Being wrong is expensive. In this posting and in the series to follow I will recommend ways to save money on your upgrade and improve your chances of success at the same time.
First, let me tell you a tale about a man I knew who tried to save money but ended up spending a lot more instead. 
Clem (not his real name) decided to build a 6500 square foot home on a lake. He got bids from several experienced building managers but to him they were all too high. He had managed a couple of projects at work. Why not manage his own building project and save the money he thought. Things seemed to go well at first but soon he began to discover that mistakes were made. Correcting those mistakes turned out to be very expensive; many times more expensive than it would have been to hire an expert manager.
My first recommendation for saving money: Spend good money to get a project leader who knows how to do an upgrade. Do not skimp. Do not automatically pick the candidate with the lowest rate. If you have an internal project manager make sure that you supplement with upgrade management expertise from the outside.
The last time I talked to Clem he was atop a Bobcat moving dirt from his building site all the way across the subdivision and dumping it on another plot. He had been moving dirt all week and didn’t know when he would finish. The inspector had told him that not enough dirt had been removed in the original excavation and the first major storm could swamp the house with mud. The ugly end to this story is that he ran out of construction money and had to sell his dream home even before it was finished.
Stay tuned for more postings in the series, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights
News from SRUG: Compelling Reasons to Upgrade
What are your compelling reasons to upgrade to Oracle PeopleSoft 9.1? This is the question that was put to a group of PeopleSoft customers at the Southeast Regional Users Group (SRUG.)
There had been a number of presentations at the SRUG about what was coming in the new release. Valuable new features and functions were demonstrated. Ample advice was offered on best practices for successful upgrades. Oracle presenters produced a variety of impressive slides describing the new and improved technology that could be gained through an upgrade. The what, who, where, and how were described, often in painstaking detail. However, the WHY had been only lightly touched upon.
Here is what the group had to say:
- Avoid extended support fees- According to Oracle’s Technology Price List extended support adds 10 to 20 percent to your annual software license and support charges. On the flip side, Oracle has waived PeopleSoft 8.9 extended support fees until June 2011.
- Assure timely and accurate regulatory updates- Usually this means tax changes. Get them wrong or get them in late and real problems can ensue. In early 2009 Oracle announced an additional year of extended support for PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.8. The date was moved out from December 2010 to December 2011. Let’s say for arguments sake that it takes 4 to 6 months to do a major upgrade. December is always a bad time to cutover a new release. The October timeframe is doable. Work back from there and you may quickly come to understand that if your 8.8-to-9.1 upgrade does not get off the ground sometime before the onset of Winter 2011 you may end up in something called indefinite Sustaining Support. I am not quite sure what that entails but it does not sound pleasant.
- Modernize the technology platform- Many customers seem to be stuck on old operating systems, old database releases, and old hardware. They can’t upgrade the foundation without upgrading the dependent applications.
- Consolidate your applications portfolio- Are you paying twice; Oracle license fees for functionality you are not using while cutting monthly checks to a third party vendor for almost the same thing? Recruitment was one example where significant money could be saved by bringing an outside system back home to PeopleSoft.
- Electronic Approvals- Need to gain more control of your operations but don’t want to add to your bureaucratic paper trail? Several users spoke highly of the new Approval Workflow Engine (AWE) that has been efficiently integrated into the 9.1 release. As one participant put it, “It is finally good enough to implement.”
PeopleSoft 9.1 Upgrade Insights: Set high standards – Part 2
In Part 1 of setting high standards for your PeopleSoft 9.1 upgrade I listed a few reasons why Upgrade guidlelines and standards are important.
First, it is just plain bad project management to allow every developer to do their own thing? 
.
Second, all changes made to the new release must be tracked relentlessly from inception through the final cutover to production. Not knowing where your changes are and why you made them can put your schedule in jeopardy.
Finally, having different developers handling the same item in different ways can lead to different results. And to a severe drop in end-user confidence if not remedied.
In my prior posting I covered Data Standards & Guidelines. In this posting I will be offering forth some suggested Object/process Standards & Guidelines.:
- Modification Logs- If you have not yet instituted a modification log now would be a great time. A modification log is a dated sequence of developer activity. The standard convention is to put the most recent change at the top of the list. Typical fields include:
- Date
- Developer
- Project
- Description of change
- Related Projects, Fit/Gap issues, other items
- Project Naming standards – – Multiple developers may be working on your upgrade. It is crucial that they all use the same naming conventions so that a simple PeopleTools query can easily find and report all upgrade related work. Here is a proven naming scheme:
|Organization| _ |Master Project| _ |Project| _ |Version|- Organization – Usually 2 characters. Must be different than Oracle/PS delivered update projects.
- Master Project- U91 would indicate work being done for the PeopleSoft 9.1 upgrade
- Project- Assignable individual project such as VacAwd (Vacation Awards)
- Version- A number indicating subsequent changes. For instance, Version 1 would contain all changes up to and including the first test move. Version 2 may only contain fixes to problems discovered after the first move.
- Properties of PeopleSoft objects- Take advantage of the comments field within the properties section of each object. The format of this documentation is:
|Project name| , |Change date| , |Developer| , |Description|An example of this format would be:
MY_U91_VacAwd_1, 11/01/2010, RJ, Initial Vacation Awards redevelopment ISSUE# 12.0.1
- Batch Processes- All new or modified batch processes (e.g. SQR) must have a modification log. All upgrade changes must be tied to a specific upgrade project (U91)
- Online Processes- Document changes of PeopleSoft PeopleCode or other online processes at the beginning of the program. The documentation must include the developer making the change, the date of the change, and the reason for the change. The format would look like this:
‘/* |Project Name|, |date| , |developer| |description| */
An example of coding is listed below:
/*MY_U91_VacAwd_1, 10/9/2010, RJ, Added logic to set the default for field EMPLOYMENT_PF.EMPPF_STATUS_DT */
The actual changes will probably be imbedded in the delivered code. The start and end of changes must be indicated:
‘/*Begin mod MY_U91… */’
…..
……. Modified code ……..
……
‘/*End Mod MY_U91… */’Comment out PeopleSoft vanilla coding instead of deleting the coding. This will make the PeopleCode easier to maintain during future upgrades.
If undocumented changes are discovered they must be labeled as Pre-PS9.1 customization at the beginning of the PeopleCode and imbedded code.
Stay tuned for more postings in the series, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights
PeopleSoft 9.1: More news from the Southeast RUG
Recently, I made the trek to Atlanta to attend the Southeast Regional Users Group (SRUG.) The venue was small and the rooms were packed but my sense is that almost all attendees considered the time well spent. 
I was pleased to discover that there were some high-quality sessions given by people who are actually working in the PeopleSoft 9.1 environment. Getting real life experiences is the lifeblood of these types of gatherings.
My prior SRUG posting listed some of the HRMS 9.1 “gotchas” discovered by early upgraders. Please feel free to check it out.
It is a little unusual for me to post commentary about a session I didn’t actually attend. But Janet Martin of BTRG, Inc. was nice enough to provide me with a copy of Features of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1: Core HCM & Benefits. I must say that upon review I find her PeopleSoft 9.1 presentation one of the best I’ve seen on the topic. The key 9.1 changes are highlighted in red and the operational impacts of those changes well illustrated. For instance, the slides covering eCompensation explain step-by-step the new streamlined procedures for managing an organization’s specific compensation cycle.
The general areas covered in the presentation are:
- Profile Management
- Career Planning
- Succession Planning
- eCompensation enhancements
- ePerformance enhancements
- Other core HR enhancements
Janet has started a blog and I have happily added it to my favorites list. Her blog title speaks for itself: Ramblings of a PeopleSoft Upgrade Project Manager. If you leave a comment or note that you are interested in her presentation she may be as kind to you as she has been to me.
Stay tuned for more postings on discoveries and insights gained at the Southeast RUG meeting.
PeopleSoft 9.1: News from the Southeast RUG
Last week I made the trek to Atlanta to attend the Southeast Regional Users Group (SRUG.) The opening session drove home the sad fact that two years had passed since the last SRUG meeting. Time does pass swiftly by.
Nevertheless, it was good to see so many people and organizations interested in PeopleSoft 9.1. The venue was small but the place was packed.
There were some quite good sessions given by people who are actually working in the PeopleSoft 9.1 environment. Getting real life experiences is the lifeblood of these types of gatherings.
The Southeast RUG did not disappoint.
Scott Eubank and Cliff Smith from Hypergen, Inc. gave a 45 minute HRMS 9.1 delta presentation based on direct upgrade experiences. If you leave a note on their website I am sure they will send you a copy. I thought the most significant part was the list of “gotchas” which I summarize below:
- New custom garnishment rules- Setup your own rules for garnishing wages.
- No benefit cost row for waives – there used to be a data row when an employee waved medical or other like plan.
- New coverage formula table- create simple formulas to define how coverage should be calculated. These formulas are used by both life and disability insurance plans.
- Retro Pay Triggers-- Full rebuild is required.
- Recruiting Solutions-- Due to total 8.9 re-write any customizations done to 8.8 or prior releases will need to be completely re-analyzed, re-done, and re-applied.
- PeopleTools Application Designer-- New C++ libraries must be loaded before App Designer can be invoked.
- New Upgrade/Compare step dependencies-- Application domain and process scheduler must be running for CA steps to execute.
- Windows 2008 R2 not supported for COBOL-- Earlier versions of Windows 2008 are supported.
- 9999/99/99 date format-- Not supported in SQL SVR.
Stay tuned for at least two more postings on discoveries made and insights gained at the Southeast RUG meeting.
Workforce hazards ahead?
Things you may not know about your current and future workforce could hurt your business. You know that your workforce is changing but you may not be sure how or why. What are the hazards and pitfalls to be avoided?
The newer, inexperienced people seem, well you know, less engaged than you remember yourself being at the same point in your career. The people who are experienced seem more seasoned than the veterans of yesteryear.
What about employee health? Why is it that your older workers seem so much healthier than your younger workers? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
Dr. John Howard is the current director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), an agency of the Federal Government.
NIOSH provides national and world leadership to prevent work-related illness, injury, disability, and death by gathering information, conducting scientific research, and translating the knowledge gained into products and services, including scientific information products, training videos, and recommendations for improving safety and health in the workplace.
In late May 2010 Dr. Howard gave a speech at the American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Expo on the subject of workforce hazards. Not hazards associated with fighting fires or working a mile below the surface of the ocean. He talked about the hazards associated with a changing workforce composition. He covered 11 distinct trends well worth contemplating.
- Limited availability of workers of the future – Fewer young workers are entering the work force, a trend that will continue in the coming years. This can be attributed to longer life expectancies, which increased dramatically over the course of the 20th century; and lower fertility rates in the United States and worldwide. As a result, the work force will see fewer young workers entering the ranks.
- More older workers – Howard, who called older workers “chronologically gifted,” said this group will grow substantially in the work force. “And it’s part of a worldwide phenomenon … This is the graying of the world as opposed to just the United States,” he said.
- Health-challenged young workers – Employers might assume younger workers are in great shape, Howard said, but that’s not necessarily true. Obesity alone threatens large numbers of children and young adults in the United States. Weight problems can lead to high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, sleep apnea, musculoskeletal disorders and much more.
- Key skills deficit in young workers – Howard explained that over the next decade, nearly 30 percent of American 20-year-olds will obtain a college degree, but 60 percent of new jobs will require a degree. With growing numbers of high school dropouts and school districts fighting to improve their graduation rates, Howard said, this is clearly going to add to the global labor crunch.
Perhaps, Dr. Howard’s speech will help answer some questions about the changing nature of your current workforce and help you prepare for future transformations. There are many ways that you can tackle these pending issues. Some are strategic. Some are organizational. Some require new policies & procedures for retaining and attracting talent. And some will require better technology.
As an Oracle Peoplesoft Enterprise customer one new technology worth considering is the 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: Set high standards(Part1)
You have a strategy. You have a plan. You have the results of the Fit/Gap. You and your developers are fired up and ready to go. Everyone is super ready to code something whether it be peoplecode, SQR, Application Engines, AJAX, or whatever. But do you want everybody doing their own thing? If the answer is no then setting strong standards will help guarantee the success of your upgrade re-development work.
Let me quickly list a few reasons why Upgrade re-development standards are important and then I will share some of the standards & guidelines I have used on past projects.
First, all changes made to the new release must be tracked from the inception to the final cutover to production. Each test move sets a foundation for the next. Changes made subsequent to a test move may need to be upgraded separately. Re-development actions are most often assigned as self-contained sub-projects such as: Manager Self Service compensation planning.
Each sub-project could entail changing or adding a number of dependent objects and/or processes. Tying them all together into a single PeopleSoft project will facilitate debugging, testing, and the final move to production.
Finally, having a bunch of developers handling similar or the same items differently can lead to real problems. Many of the changes in an Enterprise upgrade are substantially the same for everybody. A Record Field change may affect a great many existing objects & processes but each object should be handled in a consistent manner. One developer doing a thing one way and another developer doing the same thing a different way is bad form.
Here some suggested Data Standards & Guidelines. I will follow-up with object/process standards in part 2. Thoroughly understanding the new data structures is a major key in efficiently and effectively recreating your production system. Here are four places I usually start in getting a handle on data changes:
- Create an upgrade data dictionary- An excel workbook divided into individual spreadsheets is a excellent data repository tool. It is easily organized into separate but related sheets containing New fields, Deleted tables, New Views, and much more. It is very searchable. And you can store, copy, or paste SQL, PeopleCode, SQR text associated with the appropriate item. In this way developers can readily share common solutions.
- HCM_89MP1_to_91_HTML spreadsheets- – Provided by Oracle containing various lists of data item differences.
- HCM_ERD_PACKAGE- Oracle’s set of Entity Relationship Diagrams is a good reference document, especially helpful in determining connections between data items
- SQR comparisons-Compare your current vanilla SQRs to the same SQRs delivered in the new release. These results are a great place to discover pertinent differences and more importantly identify the new Oracle/PeopleSoft coding needed to handle those differences.
Stay tuned for more postings in the series, PeopleSoft Upgrade Insights
Peoplesoft 9.1: Unsticking the ORACLE logo
Over the years I have worked on a number of Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise implementations and upgrades. 
Just about every customer with whom I have worked has required that the delivered logo be replaced with a logo or logos of the customer’s choice. Most often the new logo would be the official company logo. Perhaps, a self service logo in the MyHr vein was needed as well.
Regardless, changing the Oracle/PeopleSoft logo was a relatively simple action. In prior PeopleTools releases the delivered logo was an image object named NEW_PS_LOGO. Replacing this object with your own image would do the trick. Not in PeopleTools 8.50. You can change this image over and over and that darn Oracle Logo will just remain stuck right where it is. It always worked in the past. It does not work now. I know that for some a high level of frustration could result from a situation like this.
Take heart. There is a new solution and it involves updating a new field: PT_ORACLELOGO_SWAN.
For those of you on My Oracle Support more information can be can be found by performing this search:
“ Customize PT8.50 Oracle Logo” – How to customize PT8.50 Oracle logo and PeopleSoft Header? In PT8.4x, to change the logo, developers could…
Please stay tuned for the new postings in my series – PeopleSoft 9.1: Practical Improvements.