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.
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