Week 2, Day 1

We started off the week by reviewing a small presentation that I put together over the weekend. It included the reasons to upgrade (or re-implement), importance of planning, phase 1 tasks broken down by mini phases, and deliverables out of each mini phase. Core Project team attended this meeting and the meeting was productive.

We then spoke with two vendors, one a big name and the second one a decent sized consulting company. Our director arranged for these meetings and calls, where she gave them a list of questions before hand and we sort of tried to pick their brains about the best approach to our project.

Big name vendor - It went more like a sales meeting. Our questions were around whether we should do a re-implementation or an upgrade, how our team structure should be, what kind of staff aug arrangements that they can suggest if they were selected and a host of other issues. This vendor's answers were not very straight forward. They danced around most of the issues leaving us no less confused by the end of the meeting.

Consulting company - I liked the person who spoke with us during this call. She has plenty of experience in PS implementations and gave us honest and straight forward answers to our questions. She promised to follow up with some required documentation, and seemed very eager to work with us and earn our business. I have a good feeling about this company.

Its only first day of the week, and we have calls scheduled with more vendors over the next few days.

I am working on the Project Plan and I need to get it ready by end of the day tomorrow.

Week 1

We kicked off the project discussions on 8/16/10. We formed a small core group to discuss how to go about securing the funding. I will not get into too many details, but we decided to formulate the Business case, and a full project plan with as much as detail as possible within two weeks. Its a pretty aggressive timeline, but now worries, we"ll get it done.

We met a few times during this week to discuss the items below

1. Re-implementation vs Upgrade: As our system is fairly customized we wanted to explore the option of Re-implementation instead of traditional upgrade. We have heard some good and bad things about both the approaches, and haven't made a final decision at this point...although leaning more towards an Upgrade.
2. Scope items (in/out items on a high level)
3. Project structure: Outsource vs Staff Aug. Ruled out outsourcing as we didn't have great results doing that in the past. We discussed on how many consultants we will need, how to pair them up with the FTEs and the Project governance model
4. Phase 1 Tasks: How long should the Fit/Gap phase be, whether we should look at all the customizations and catalog them. How to go about documenting the current state of the system etc.

We had some interesting brain storming sessions and everybody pitched in enthusiastically. As a PM its very important for me to make sure that these sessions, or any future sessions for that matter remain interesting and not become monotonous.

While we didn't have any pre-defined deliverable for this week, we made significant progress on Phase 1 Business case and Project Plan.

Introduction

I am starting this blog to document my journey through various stages of a PeopleSoft 9.1 HCM upgrade project. I am the Project Manager on this project, and we are currently in the very initial stages of the project.

 

Why blog? - Yes, I can document all this in my Project notes, which I am going to do anyway. But this blog is intended to jot down the experiences in a more free flowing, non-structured and informal way. I am going to write about anything and everything that I come across during this project, including my frustrations. Also I want other PMs out there doing similar projects to benefit from my experience.

 

What in included in the Project? - We are currently on PS HCM 8.9 and are going to 9.1 release. We are taking this opportunity to upgrade our hardware and OS as well. In a nutshell, this is what included (some of this might get de-scoped as the project progresses)

• Upgrade our current HCM modules: Core HCM, Base Benefits, eRecruit, Remove partial Position Management
• Remove a high number of customizations
• Replace a customized compensation planning bolt-on with eCompensation
• Replace PSoft EPM DW Workforce Analytics with OBIEE HR Analytics
• Implement Manager Self Service and Employee Self Service
• Turn on (but not configure) Succession Planning and Manage Skills & Competencies
• Complete a technology refresh (HW/OS - Solaris 2.8 to 2.10/PeopleTools - 8.47 to 8.50)
• Implement PeopleSoft's People Model

  

Who is the client? - For security and privacy reasons I wont be taking any of the real names, including mine or that of company's. Lets call me Neo, and the company ABC Industries. I am a full time employee with the company.