The Symphony Blog

PeopleSoft Selective Adoption – How your organization can be successful

What is Selective Adoption?

With version 9.2, PeopleSoft has changed the way maintenance, enhancements and new features are delivered and applied. Customers choose the changes they want—on their schedule—while retaining strategic customizations. New enhancements are made available on a regular basis, as update images, approximately every 10 weeks, so customers don’t have to wait for the next release and go through an expensive upgrade to improve the value of their applications.

As an organization on PeopleSoft 9.2, “Selective Adoption” means:

• You get new capabilities without the need to implement a major upgrade ever again.
• You take only the changes you want, when you want, managing and implementing these “update images” with PeopleSoft Update Manager, or PUM.
• You don’t need to be current on maintenance to take changes.
• Do all this while retaining strategic customizations.
• You are able to proactively manage application growth and utilization.

What’s the Real Benefit?

Selective Adoption has been around for several years now and organizations that have upgraded to 9.2 and have implemented effective Selective Adoption strategies are experiencing significant benefits, saving time and money and customizations are down.

“Clients that have upgraded to PeopleSoft 9.2 report time savings of 35% to 50% in the update and upgrade process.” – Michael Guay, Gartner

Defining a Selective Adoption Strategy

When we talk about defining a strategy, we mean setting your organization’s approach for Selective Adoption – one that is in line with a model of continuous improvement and delivery. With that, there are a few steps you can take to define that strategy.

• Change the organizational mindset.
• Develop a schedule that works best for your organization and fits the new Selective Adoption model.
• Plan your Selective Adoption budget.
• Plan for taking on new features.

Change the Organizational Mindset

For an organization to take full advantage of the Selective Adoption delivery model, it must be proactive and ready to adopt change. A proactive organization is one that sees the change, understands the opportunity, and adjusts internal processes to optimize change into the business.

This is a new concept; with new concepts come new mindsets. Remember we are now living in a world without upgrades, and that means your system is more agile. Also remember that updates are coming out more frequently which can make it easier to take on new features and apply maintenance.

It’s important for those developing this new strategy to understand there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” approach to Selective Adoption. The only “wrong” is to have NO approach at all. What may work for one organization may not work for another – even those with a similar technology footprint.

Develop a Schedule

Each organization should plan a schedule for continuous delivery that works best for them. You may want to stagger updates to occur at different times or perform them all at once.
A suggested scheduling approach:

• Start by developing a plan to get current to the most recent 9.2 image, if you aren’t already.
• When they are released, immediately apply critical (P1) tax, regulatory, and security updates using the latest update image.
• Regularly apply scheduled, low-cost, high impact features and fixes. These are small, targeted efforts that require little development time and have a low impact on users.
• Every 6 to 12 months, make sure to have your products updated to the current maintenance levels and take advantage of all the latest features. When your products are up-to-date, applications run better and future features and maintenance are easier to apply.

Plan a Budget

It is important to plan a budget so that your Selective Adoption project has the necessary resources needed to make it successful. Doing so will also help demonstrate the value of planning and implementing the SA strategy.

Develop a Plan for Taking on New Features

Selective Adoption allows you to decide which updates and features to implement and when. It is crucial to think through your priorities and strategy for this form of continuous improvement, and to develop a plan to reduce customizations. Make sure to invite all appropriate business (including executive leadership), IT staff, along with your Selective Adoption Partner to the table when this collaborative plan is developed.