Arvind Rajan
While upgrading to version PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0 has many benefits, customers often face challenges in planning and executing the upgrade. There can be resource, budget, and time constraints; a poorly defined business case and return-on-investment statement; difficulty in estimating the complexity of the upgrade; and insufficient training on new features and knowledge of their impact on the system.
To fully understand the change that a major application upgrade is going to introduce into your system, you must know what the change is all about, and how it will help or hurt you. Impact Analysis can help. Impact analysis is the process of comparing your current application code and configuration to that of version 9.0 to quantify and qualify change from one version to the other. It shows you the effect this change will have on the upgrade, and the additional effort required to incorporate this change into your upgrade plan.
Impact analysis offers a forward-looking view of your system that helps you understand where the breakpoints are, and how much risk, effort and delta you will need to manage. It will also help you understand whether you need to migrate, drop or redevelop a customization or business process during your upgrade. It will review everything from your current business processes and the changes that impact them, to the custom code that supports your everyday needs.
In addition, Impact Analysis will help you understand the complexity of the change you are undertaking in an upgrade. The quantitative part of Impact Analysis will aid you in estimating and planning the upgrade effort, whereas the qualitative effort will help you align the right resources (internal and external) to execute your upgrade successfully, on time, and within budget. Customers need this type of analytical information prior to the start of their upgrade. Armed with this Impact Analysis intelligence, they can determine the complexity of their upgrade effort, and scope and budget for it accordingly.
While PeopleSoft provides some amount of custom code analysis with its Application Compare Report, the current custom code can only be compared against new release features after a PeopleTools Upgrade has been completed. Customers need this information before beginning the upgrade, so that they can use it for planning, budgeting and estimation. Also, a Compare Report is often voluminous and cryptic, leaving much to be desired in the general reporting sense. A Compare Report does not provide a comparison of batch programs; customers are on their own when it comes to sorting out custom code changes to these programs.
During a recent upgrade project from version 8.0 to 9.0, a leading U.S. university conducted Impact Analysis of its upgrade project. The analysis reviewed over 4,000 objects; categorized them by complexity, type and volume; estimated effort of change; and mapped delta for processes and objects. The university used this analysis to streamline its upgrade plan and go from a time and materials engagement to a fixed-price project, reducing project cost by over 30%. The data from the Impact Analysis also helped the university prioritize its work by complexity and business criticality, while streamlining and eliminating some customizations.
Impact Analysis helps customers fully understand the change an upgrade is going to introduce. Impact Analysis produced prior to the upgrade also has a significant downstream impact on all the phases of the upgrade project by speeding up fit-gap analysis, development and testing.
About the author
Arvind Rajan is a PeopleSoft Solution Architect and Upgrade Specialist at Astute Business Solutions, an Oracle Partner that specializes in the delivery of high-value, cost effective and smart business solutions for Enterprise applications.
