PeopleSoft Upgrade Delivered in Six Months
Cloud applications' advancement has changed the perception of the lifecycle of enterprise software and, along with that, expectations have changed. To move to the selective adoption model and stay current with their Oracle support agreement, Kal Tire made the decision to upgrade their HCM application.
Based on the reviews, Kal Tire determined that this would be primarily a technical upgrade, with a deeper look at work centres during the upgrade project to determine if they would be useful to the team members in payroll. After thoroughly defining the scope and the schedule of the upgrade project, it was successfully completed in six months.
Business Needs
Cloud applications' advancement has changed the perception of the lifecycle of enterprise software and, along with that, expectations have changed. Organizations now want the ability to add business value incrementally without the high cost of expensive upgrades every three to five years. And they also want the ability to choose what they want and the timing of when to apply them so that changes are not disruptive to their business cycle.
In response to these changes in expectations and emerging industry standards, Oracle changed the way that maintenance and new enhancements are delivered and applied for PeopleSoft. The selective adoption model eliminated the need for expensive major upgrades as well as other key benefits that presented a compelling business case to move to PeopleSoft 9.2. In order to move to the selective adoption model and also to stay current with their Oracle support agreement, Kal Tire made the decision to upgrade their HCM application to 9.2 and PeopleTools to 8.55.
Outcomes
- Completes on time, under budget
- Saves an estimated 30% of budgeted development time using a testing-first approach
- Experiences zero help desk calls on day one
Solution
Oracle Solution
To help achieve their goal of upgrading their PeopleSoft HCM application to the next version, Kal Tire turned to NTT DATA, leveraging its successful implementation and upgrade experience. NTT DATA provided project management, functional and technical expertise.
This successful upgrade was undertaken in two projects:
Upgrade Planning
To ensure the upgrade was scoped and budgeted correctly, NTT DATA worked with Kal Tire to plan for their upgrade, in which two key areas of analysis were completed.
- A review of the new features in 9.2, which allowed the team to clearly understand new functionality of interest to Kal Tire, and to help define the upgrade project scope.
- A review of existing customizations to identify those that may be removed because they were no longer being used, or if the customization was now part of the delivered functionality in 9.2.
Based on the reviews, Kal Tire determined that this would be primarily a technical upgrade, with a deeper look at work centres during the upgrade project to determine if they would be useful to the team members in payroll. The outcome resulted in a detailed plan to accomplish the technical upgrade, a project definition document that clearly outlined the project scope, along with the schedule and stakeholders. The timing for the upgrade passes was also agreed upon during the planning phase, allocating sufficient time for both the functional team and developers to complete their tasks.
Executing the upgrade project
After thoroughly defining the scope and the schedule of the upgrade project, it was successfully completed in six months and it included the following key elements:
- Deeper dive into new functionality. During project development, functional team members reviewed the changes in the new version in more detail with closer evaluation of work centres and Fluid User Interface (UI). After demonstrations and design working sessions, Kal Tire elected to leave the implementation of work centre functionality out of the upgrade project with plans for future implementation, and made decisions on Fluid UI and key areas where it will be used.
- Unique approach in development work to reapply customizations. The project used an approach that involved minimal time (one week of effort) to reapply key customizations, and instead, for the majority of customizations adopted a testing-first approach. With this approach, only the test failures were provided to the development team for retrofitting, as opposed to the approach often used which is for the development team to analyze and touch all customizations to evaluate what retrofitting was needed. This resulted in an estimated savings of 30% of budgeted development time, and a similar reduction in the support needed from the developers for subsequent testing.
- Test early with stakeholders. The test-early approach included significant testing by the functional team in the development environment prior to the objects being migrated to the System Test environment for full integration testing. The functional team developed thorough test scenarios and scripts, and parallel payroll testing was completed after test moves one and two. Users from each area of the business were invited to test the system during user acceptance testing, and the application was successfully passed.
- Dedicated business involvement. Kal Tire had three dedicated resources to the project with additional involvement of 20 to 30 business subject matter experts during various phases on the project.
Benefits
Overall, the project was completed on time and under budget. The initial pass and test moves one, two, and three completed on the agreed schedule and the final move to production occurred on schedule over a weekend. The users of the system were pleased with the Fluid navigation as it was very easy to determine where in the application one needed to navigate to perform a task. There were no calls to the help desk on day one and only two small items to be resolved. The first off-cycle payroll ran on day three of production with no issue and on-cycle payroll ran smoothly the second week of production.
*This case study was originally written by Sierra Systems Group Inc., which has become NTT DATA Services as of 17 December 2018.
About Kal Tire Client Story
To help achieve Kal Tire’s goal of upgrading their PeopleSoft HCM application to the latest version, the organization turned to NTT DATA to leverage its successful implementation and upgrade experience.
