Last week we began a new blog series on Selective Adoption by answering the question, “What is Selective Adoption?” as well as defining some steps for success:

1. Define Your Strategy
2. Implement a Test Automation
3. Measure Your Progress
4. Stay Informed

Today I will highlight what we mean by “Define Your Strategy,” and what we are hearing about PeopleSoft Selective Adoption strategies from the community.

STEPS FOR DEFINING A STRATEGY

When we talk about defining a strategy, we mean setting your organization’s approach for Selective Adoption. With that, there are a few steps you can take to define that strategy.

1. Change a mindset
2. Plan a schedule
3. Plan a budget
4. Take on new features
5. Incorporate PeopleTools strategy

CHANGE A MINDSET

The first of the five steps in defining your strategy is to change your mindset. PeopleSoft Selective Adoption, for the most part, is a new concept; with new concepts come new mindsets. We are now living in a world without upgrades, and that means your system is more agile. We are also looking at updates that are coming out more frequently and can make it easier to take on new features and apply maintenance. Selective Adoption also means that you’re more in control of your system because you get to decide what to apply and when to apply it based on your business needs. From what I can tell from conversations with customers, the companies that have made a mindset change are experiencing great success with Selective Adoption; those that are still thinking that these are “big bang” upgrades are struggling to stay current and get the most out of PeopleSoft.

PLAN A SCHEDULE

After you define your strategy, you should plan a schedule to outline when you are able to take on your maintenance and new features. Choose a schedule that works best for your organization, either staggering updates to occur at different times or doing them all at once. The plan that I have seen the most frequently is:

• 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 12-16 months, update your products to 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

The next step in defining your Selective Adoption strategy is to plan a budget.  It is important to plan a budget so that your project doesn’t get side tracked from another project, and it will also help show the value of creating a Selective Adoption strategy. We have heard from several customers that they are saving money by employing this new strategy.

TAKE ON NEW FEATURES

After planning your budget, I recommend that you create a plan to take on the new features; this is the beauty of selectively adopting items…you get to decide when and what you will utilize. In this step, it is crucial to invite both business and IT to the table to develop a collaborative plan. For your strategy to be successful you will have to have buy-in from both sides to execute and adopt the features.

INCORPORATE PEOPLETOOLS STRATEGY

Last, but definitely not least, make sure you incorporate your PeopleTools strategy. If you incorporate these two strategies together, it will make it easier to update new application features and fixes. In rare cases, bug fixes might require a certain PeopleTools patch level. Oracle makes every effort to ensure that required patches have been generally available for 9-12 months.

This is just a summary of all that I have heard and seen from our community. To find out more and hear from other users about their experiences with Selective Adoption, I would suggest attending one of the many Selective Adoption Panels we have scheduled on our Events page and watching some of the recordings from our Content Library.

Up next in the series, I will go into more detail about step 2: Implement a Test Automation.