Upgrade Questions Worth Asking
A Technical Checklist for PeopleSoft Upgrades
Posted on 1/9/2007 (originally published in print on 1/1/2005)
by Cayce Balara
I put this checklist together over the course of a couple of what I will call disorganized upgrade projects. I was working for PeopleSoft at the time and the clients in each case had decided to go it alone on their upgrade. By this I mean they had no consulting assistance from PeopleSoft, and much more importantly, no upgrade training for their own employees. All three clients I worked with were relying on the upgrade lab, and while those folks do a great job, they are, in my opinion, no substitute for solid classroom training on the tools and methodologies of an upgrade. PeopleSoft has released some great new tools with 8.44 and later tools releases – just another reason for getting plenty of training for your technical team.
So what I was faced with in each instance was a situation where not everything I, as a technical lead, would have wanted in place for an upgrade was actually in place. These weren't total catastrophic nightmares mind you, just disorganized. For instance, one client had demo, development and test environments set up; they just didn't have a formal plan (or much of an idea for that matter) of how to use these databases appropriately during their upgrade. In the second and third situations I found myself looking at a lot of the same problems and asking a lot of the same questions, so I spent some time putting together a questionnaire that I would start handing to clients on the first day of the project. The idea was to get them thinking about everything that goes into a PeopleSoft upgrade as soon as I landed, whether that was during pre-planning or halfway through.
The questions on my list are intended to assist the upgrade project team in identifying technical areas that may have been overlooked by project management in planning a PeopleSoft upgrade project. While this list is not comprehensive, most of the major pitfall areas associated with upgrade project planning that I have ever run into are covered in one way or another. Your team will have covered much of this stuff already, but it's always those one or two items that slipped through the cracks that cause the most trouble. Hopefully you'll hit those items from this list or from the discussion prompted by reviewing this list.
You don't have to do everything indicated in these questions. Every situation is different and there is no "magic bullet" template that will work for everybody. However, you do need to put some thought into the areas outlined here. It is my firm belief that having answers to these questions at or near project inception will serve to prepare you well for the technical challenges of a PeopleSoft upgrade.
This checklist should be distributed to and reviewed by project management and all team leads. All conclusions, resolutions and decisions reached through review and discussion of these questions should be thoroughly documented in the project diary. As your project progresses, take the time to review the list and the project team's answers occasionally to make sure that you have accounted for any unforeseen changes in the environment.
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