In part one we identified some of the main reasons large PeopleSoft projects fail.  Now let’s discuss how we mitigate these risks and implement for our clients successfully.

Risk: The solution is not tied to the business objectives.

• As outlined in previous blogs, one of the first activities we conduct is the BluePrint Workshop. The workshop identifies all of the project objectives, classifies them as strategic or tactical, prioritizes all of the objectives, identifies how we are able to measure each objective (after all, if you can’t measure it, it is challenging to determine if it was met).  Finally we attach project success criteria to the objectives.  These objectives are a part of the project charter which is expected to be signed off by the executive sponsor.

Risk: Scope is not managed.

• Every project has a well defined scope change management plan with appropriate escalations and approvals.  Preferable is the approach that any change to scope once the fit/gap is completed requires a change order whether it is the smallest seemingly insignificant change or a very large change.  All changes have must be approved by project management and executive sponsorship to be fully approved for the project.

Risk: Organization is not prepared for change.

•  A full time organizational change management lead who is experienced with preparing organizations for change associated with PeopleSoft engagements should be deployed on the project.  Organizational change preparedness is so much more than simply communication in that is requires its own discipline, expertise and dedicated skillsets.

Risk: Project team skills are not appropriate and unavailable.

• During the BluePrint Workshop we identify the required resources required from both the client and MIPRO.  For each client resource we identify the very specific role and responsibilities along with the percentage of time they are required for the project.  This information again becomes part of the project charter.  Additionally, as outlined in the charter, these are the resources required to achieve the objectives of the project and be on time and on budget.  We conduct a sanity check of resources against project objectives.  We expect the executive sponsor to support the project and ensure the identified resources are available for the anticipated timeframe.

Risk: Executive Sponsorship is not strong and not visible.

• The role of the executive sponsor begins immediately with the BluePrint Workshop where the executive sponsor outlines why the project is important to the organization and identified corporate level objectives (that we then tie to the project objectives).  The executive sponsor signs off on the project charter along with his/her expected role.  We put the executive sponsor into the change process, issue escalation process and organizational change process.

Risk: The system is not sustainable by the client.

• Knowledge transfer is the cornerstone of our SD3 implementation methodology.  Not only do we staff with the best and brightest, but we align resources directly to the appropriate client counterparts.  Our design allows for the MIPRO team to understand the client business and for the client to understand PeopleSoft.  By the end of the project we expect our clients to know as much as we do about PeopleSoft so they can sustain the system.  Additionally we ensure shortcuts are not taken on testing and training.  This is achieved if we plan appropriately upfront and execute well.

Risk: End users are not trained

• There are multiple factors used to ensure end user training.  The first is a training strategy developed up front, early in the project.  We also recommend a training lead to develop and lead the training efforts. UPK is a very valuable tool to help ensure end users are trained.  We time end user training to coincide as close to go live as possible.  As noted prior, with the proper planning we do not find ourselves in situations where the timeline is crunched and the project is looking for ways to cut corners (which usually results in training being reduced).  Having the right staffing, dedication to training and planning allows us to ensure end users are trained appropriately.

2012…what’s in store for you this year?

If Santa didn’t leave you an upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 under your tree, nor PeopleTools 8.52 in your stocking Christmas morning, you may need to take control of the situation yourself.  Whether you are losing support for your current PeopleSoft applications or you finally have managed to set aside some of your hard-earned budget, this could be the year you pursue making your PeopleSoft applications work even harder for you, and Oracle has provided more than 200 additional features through 9.1, PeopleTools 8.52, and the subsequent feature packs.

A couple of highlights:

Forms and Approval Builder.  This new feature is part of Common Components 9.1, therefore available for use throughout all of the PeopleSoft HCM and FMS modules.  It provides a business analyst or other non-developer PeopleSoft application expert to create simple forms and establish an approval for the content.

Enhanced Search Capability.  PeopleSoft 9.1 allows users to perform global searches across multiple indexes and return the results organized by dynamic facets (segments), then take action based on search results, without having to navigate the menu to do so.  Additionally, the Last Search Results link allows a user to return to the results of a recent search and perform additional actions or to access additional results.  Keyword Search allows for a global search across multiple components throughout the PeopleSoft application, and can be used to review more than the 300 record restriction applied to traditional field based searches.

Manager Dashboard.  This feature provides an at-a-glance view of important information to help managers know where they need to focus.  PeopleSoft Administrators designate which pages are available for managers and a user can further personalize the content details and layout.  Highlights of the Manager Dashboard include:

• Alerts and Approvals pagelets indicate what transactions need immediate attention and navigate directly to the transactions through the pagelets.
• The Direct Line Reports pagelet categorizes data for each employee across a variety areas of interest, including Job Details and Compensation, then drilldown as needed into the application for details.
• Pivot Grids enable you to easily analyze, filter, and slice relevant organizational data, including switching between various chart types for more productive analysis.
• Quick Links.  This feature provides easy access to frequently used items without having to navigate the application to access them.

Credit and Collections Workbench.  The new workbench in PeopleSoft 9.1 Receivables provides a one stop shop where receivables users can review action items, analyze customer information, and work to improve their collections-related efficiency by utilizing risk-based scoring.

Approval Framework.  The new Approval Framework, formerly referred to as the Approval Workflow Engine, is available throughout the Financials, Supply Chain, and Human Capital Management applications.  Notification Emails provide links directly into the transactions requiring approval, and approvers have the ability to push transactions back a previous approver, as well as add ad hoc reviewers and approvers as needed.  You can use the Approval Framework as delivered for existing approvals or to build additional approvals needed to support your business needs.

You can find out more about PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 applications by logging in to My Oracle Support at support.oracle.com.  For a conversation about mapping out your PeopleSoft applications strategy and roadmap for 2012 and beyond, don’t be afraid to contact us.

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It’s clear that 2011 was the year of the cloud, with many traditional enterprise vendors accepting that the cloud is something they can no longer denigrate or ignore. The ‘cloud’ buzzword has been (sometimes annoyingly) tossed around for upwards of two years, but last year is when it hit critical mass in terms of action, not just marketing and positioning.

Chris Kanaracus, writing for IDG News, highlights a few enterprise trends we’re seeing and hearing in everyday conversations. These give real heft to the notion that the cloud is something everyone should be thinking about and/or planning around. It might not be happening right now, and it might not be top priority for you, but ignore this medium- to long-term direction at your peril.

Here’s one that struck us:

SAP buys SuccessFactors, Oracle buys RightNow, both accept cloud reality

Collectively, SAP and Oracle spent nearly US$5 billion this year to acquire software vendors based in the cloud.

Each sought different types of technologies, with SAP’s purchase of SuccessFactors boosting its human-resources software offerings as well as general cloud know-how, and Oracle’s RightNow buy giving it an array of customer-support capabilities.

But the deals have a common thread, marking a sea change for the traditional on-premise software world, said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. “[It] signals the realization that cloud deployment will be the predominant approach.”

We do a massive amount of Oracle work, and what we’re hearing from Oracle and our customers is very real and perfectly synchonized: the cloud is real, it’s mature, and it’s time to start figuring out how it can help enterprise IT. It’s not just for early adopters or skunkwork labs anymore.

Along similar lines, you can’t ignore perhaps the biggest story out of Oracle, one that’s sure to mold future IT decisions for a long, long time:

Oracle delivers Fusion Applications

It took a while, but Oracle finally managed to deliver the first wave of its next-generation Fusion Applications, and its launch strategy also showed how cloud computing has influenced the enterprise software market.

The company has taken pains to stress that Fusion Applications can be deployed in a highly modular fashion, with no need to remove existing systems, and at a time of customers’ choosing. Users will also be able to run the software both on-premises and in cloud form, although some of the details of the latter remain to be made public.

Oracle’s strategy is partly a nod to reality, since few customers will rush to rip and replace their core ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems with new software, and Oracle also wants to ensure early users are successful. But its message of easier, more flexible consumption for Fusion is straight from the cloud-vendor playbook.

Now more than ever we are being asked by our clients to come in and help them simply assess: put executive/organizational expectations on a piece of paper somewhere (harder than it sounds, trust us), inventory current systems and capabilities, and plan roadmaps. Such basic blocking and tackling, but given the churn and change in what ‘enterprise IT’ will mean in three years, so important. We offer clients two very powerful planning workshops: our BluePrint Project Services and PeopleSoft Architecture Assessment, both of which are popular. Lately, we’ve been doing a lot of our BluePrint workshops, largely because of the reasons discussed a few hundred words ago: things are changing, and smart planning has never been more important.

Questions? Don’t be afraid to drop us a line. Always happy to have conversations.

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The backstory: there’s some sentiment (especially from Information week editors/contributors) surrounding this past Oracle OpenWorld that suggests Mark Hurd and other Oracle executives didn’t demonstrate enough vision. In such a wake, Oracle’s Mark Hurd granted InjformationWeek’s Rob Preston another interview to relay a message that’s refreshing clear and to-the-point: Oracle knows CIOs.  Here are the key quips that caught my eye from the interview:

He started by recapping the four prongs of Oracle’s strategy. First, it’s focusing on being best of breed in every layer of the stack: hardware, operating system, database, horizontal and vertical applications. “We want all of those capabilities to be open and work well in heterogeneous environments,” Hurd said, “and we’re lined up from engineering through sales to make that happen.”

and

Second, he said, Oracle wants to vertically integrate those pieces to deliver “extremely attractive performance, cost, and, in the end, TCO for customers.” The first manifestation of that strategy was its Exadata database appliance, then its Exalogic middleware machine, and most recently its Exalytics in-memory business intelligence machine and Big Data Appliance. Hurd reiterated Oracle’s claim that the highly tuned Exadata hardware-software combo yields 70x performance improvements–reports that took 70 minutes now take one minute, Hurd said. And those gains can be “dialed in as cost savings for our customers,” he said. “The customer who says it cost me $7 million to do that job before, you can literally take 70x off that and it costs him $100,000.”

and

Third, it’s building out its vertical industry expertise, hiring sales and technical support people to help customers in healthcare, retail, financial services, utilities, and other sectors solve their “most strategic and difficult business problems,” Hurd said.

and finally

Fourth, it will deliver applications and infrastructure “any way the customer wants it,” he said. That includes the public cloud–note its recent launch of the Oracle Public Cloud, infrastructure as a service for customers looking to develop Java apps or deploy Oracle Fusion apps in the public cloud. That strategy also includes software as a service, punctuated this week by Oracle’s $1.5 billion deal to acquire RightNow, a leader in customer service SaaS. Oracle will help customers build out private and hybrid clouds as well, or, of course, it will work with them on premises. “You can use the same code base no matter which delivery vehicle you choose,” he said.

Don’t take my word for it. Read the whole thing over at IW GlobalCIO. Very good interview by Preston.

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Great timing and/or intuition. Just when everything coming from Oracle has been heavily Fusion-centric, the company is expect to confirm its ongoing commitment to its wide array of non-Fusion applications. Here’s Anh Nguyen, reporting for Computerworld:

The company first announced its ‘applications unlimited’ policy back five years ago, its pledge to continue investing in and developing the applications that existed before Fusion indefinitely. These include E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

In his keynote presentation at the conference, Rajan Krishnan, VP of applications product development and product management for EMEA at Oracle, will review the upgrade releases for the applications over the past few years and provide a technology roadmap for the future capabilities of the applications.

Krishnan will also outline different approaches that users could take to adopting Fusion technologies.

That’s pretty much what we’re hearing. Everyone knows Fusion is eventually something that will creep its way into their IT strategy meetings, but in the meantime the concerns are much more tactical. Issues like, “Will Oracle continue to invest in and support my application infrastructure?” and “Will Oracle give me a cogent, reasonable plan to slowly adopt Fusion technology?” are two things we hear on a near-daily basis. Good to see Oracle’s reading off the same page as its customers.

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Barb Darrow, GigaOm:

Wolf’s numbers show that a select group of SaaS companies saw their values grow 313 percent from January 2009 to October 2011, compared to 154 percent growth for other software companies over the same period.

No wonder Oracle shelled out $1.5 billion for RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com keeps snapping up smaller SaaS players every month.

“With Saas, the more vertical the better,” Wolf said in interview. SaaS companies offering financial services, healthcare services or employee benefits outsourcing services, are all hot now, he added.

So who’ll be buying? The usual suspects: IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft.

Increased valuation begets consolidation, and SaaS is where all the buying is going to be happening. That much is clear. But this bubble, as it were, seems awfully vulnerable to macroeconomic factors and externalities. And as legacy software companies acquire SaaS players to broaden/deepen their portfolios, eventually valuations will get pretty muddy.

Something to watch.

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With all of the talk focused on the new Oracle Fusion HCM applications with their on-premise, on-demand and SaaS options, it seems that the old PeopleSoft workhorse of 9.1 HCM applications may have been forgotten.  But wait!  Here comes the latest feature pack (v2.0) which shines some new light on the PeopleSoft HCM suite.

PeopleSoft 9.1 HCM Feature Pack 2.0 has a Fusion flavor to it: usability enhancements through the expanded use of related content, highly configurable/flexible dashboards and embedded reporting and analytics.  While Fusion takes all this to a different level, taking some of the Fusion concepts and including them in PeopleSoft 9.1 better positions Oracle to stave off the Workday strategy of poaching their existing HCM client base.

Workday has been, in the past, been able to position itself with HR as the more user- friendly alternative to the many-clicks, menu-driven navigation and pages that PeopleSoft customers have endured over the years.  With Feature Pack 2.0, Oracle has shown that it has authoritatively produced a user-friendly, efficient and modern user experience.

The embedded reporting now available with PeopleTools 8.52 can be used to counter Workday’s embedded analytics story.  It still requires PSQuery to extract the data, but the flexibility and presentation of the data lends itself to providing the user the data they want to see in the way they want to see it.

With the Feature Pack releases, Oracle is also combating Workday’s strategy of saying that it will take Oracle years to provide new functionality and it’s a major upgrade to do.  While Feature Packs aren’t released as often as a SaaS product releases (and many organizations can argue this is a good thing), it certainly provides customers with significant new features and functionality in consumable doses.

So while it is the same old workhorse of the integrated HCM suite, it is starting to have a whole new look and focus.  Take a look at the latest Feature Pack and let us know what you think. In the meantime, here’s an overview of PeopleSoft Pivot Grids and how they represent your data based on PSQuery.

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I missed this a while back, but Vinnie Mirchandani always has interesting takes. Here’s what he saw when he watched Oracle CEO Larry Ellison give his keynote at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld:

Larry Ellison could have been somber – if he knew of his friend Steve Jobs dying he did not let on. He could have been pissy about the Marc Benioff incident in the morning. He could have been lethargic – the Infosys session that preceded his put the lady sitting next to me to sleep. Instead he was in fine fettle – humorous, sarcastic. Probably the most enjoyable OOW keynote I have seen from him in a few years.

Why?

Oracle arranged for several sessions with its Apps leadership team and several of the Fusion early adopter customers. The range and size of the customers was impressive (I spent time with senior IT and finance execs from large aerospace, mortgage, restaurant chain, federal agency, insurance, electronics firms) – as was their pragmatism. The majority were happy to be on-premise liking future flexibility to move to a SaaS or on-demand mode. Their major drivers – instead of doing a major upgrade on an existing Oracle apps platform (JDE, PeopleSoft etc) why not go with a more modern Fusion architecture?

Interesting to note that the standard upgrade junction/opportunity is making organizations consider Fusion. Some six months ago, the idea of Fusion being looked at for the next upgrade cycle was a fantasy. Now, it’s happening — for real. But is it perfect for all organizations? No –it’s still a fledgling rollout, no matter how you cut it.

Fusion is also inconsistent in its depth – richer in core financials, HRM and CRM functionality than other parts of the enterprise, and the vertical journey to migrate Retek, i-Flex etc has just begun, though Thomas Kurian , EVP Product Development gave me a confident response on the speed at which that verticalization will proceed.

Consider Fusion, but do so realistically is the takeaway here. In many of our client conversations, there’s a lot of interest in Fusion, but once the surface is scratched and pragmatism seeps into the discussion, few are ready to move away from a mature PeopleSoft system just yet.

If you have questions or comments about Fusion, its adoption and what it means for PeopleSoft, please let us know. We’ll be happy to talk. No pressure, no pitch. We enjoy talking Oracle to anyone.

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From the In Case You Haven’t Heard Dept.:

PeopleTools 8.52 is now generally available.  Here’s the official Oracle announcement, just over a week ago on Oct. 28:

PeopleTools 8.52 is important to PeopleSoft customers because it provides significant end-user value and demonstrates Oracle’s ongoing commitment to the PeopleSoft product family. The PeopleTools features and capabilities in our recent releases have created more customer excitement than we have seen in years. Many customers have told us they are preparing upgrade plans in order to gain access to these important and valuable features.

And the compatibility/upgrade path information:

PeopleTools 8.52 is a certified upgrade for 8.9 and later applications (eg. 9.0, 9.1 plus 9.1 Feature Packs). It is also certified as an upgrade for FMS8.8. Please note that it is not certified for use with other 8.8 or earlier applications. (See note on My Oracle Support regarding Maximum PeopleTools Release “MPR”)

If you want to jump right into the detail, here’s the PeopleTools 8.52 PeopleBooks. Give it a look.

We do a lot of PeopleTools assessment and upgrade work. If you have any questions, please feel free to tell us what’s on your mind.

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