PeopleSoft Selective Adoption overview

As defined by Oracle – As a PeopleSoft customer on PeopleSoft 9.2, “PeopleSoft Selective Adoption” means:

• You get new capabilities without the need to upgrade ever again.
• You take only the changes you want when you want.
• You don’t need to be current on maintenance to make changes

  To reap the benefits of “PeopleSoft Selective Adoption” organizations will need to change.

• How business and IT work together to prioritize business needs. Also, organizations will have to quickly and easily adapt to new features and apply maintenance to their PeopleSoft Applications. As Oracle releases new PeopleSoft images containing fixes and enhancements every 10 to 12 weeks, someone in the organization should take time to review/analyze these new features and showcase them to business for prioritization. Once it is reviewed, prioritized, and highlighted to business impacts. It is important to have a regularly scheduled cycle for applying them to your environments. Of course, this requires organizations to perform regular testing before promoting the enhancements to the production environments.
• How do organizations define their strategy to adjust their schedule and set a budget for frequent feature and maintenance adoption? These tasks are interrelated—when scheduling and budgeting for new feature adoption, also consider maintenance strategy (and vice versa). This also calls for enhanced regression testing with the use of PeopleTools Test Framework. Because Selective Adoption encourages organizations to apply new features and maintenance more frequently than in the past, automated regression test scripts are essential, which enables them to perform testing in a lesser time frame and with very minimal manpower. The best way to reduce the amount of time it takes to test is to utilize the PeopleSoft Lifecycle Tools, such as the PeopleSoft Test Framework. PeopleSoft Test Framework is an automation testing tool that can significantly reduce the time required for system test, applied maintenance and new features. PeopleSoft Test Framework is specifically designed to work with PeopleTools. With PeopleSoft Test Framework, testers can:
• Capture and simulate the online use of PeopleSoft applications.
• Customize tests, record test results, and report on any test failures.
• How maintenance planning will have to be streamlined with this new approach.
• Apply regulatory and critical changes on a regular basis, leverage the dependency and prevent critical issues from surfacing.
• Consider applying enhancements in your change packages that coincide with critical and regulatory changes. With this business at the same time tests for tax updates, critical changes, and enhancements
• PeopleSoft enables you to customize applications to meet your needs. Organizations’ selective adoption strategy should consider how these customizations impact the ease with which one can apply new features and maintenance. Some simple guidelines to keep in mind to achieve this are:
• Prioritize configuration over customization. Configurations are stored with application data instead of PeopleTools data. New features, such as related actions, related content, pivot grids, dashboards, and WorkCenters can all be configured.
• Avoid customizing existing PeopleTools objects, which could make applying maintenance to the objects more costly and time-consuming. Instead of customizing existing objects, add custom PeopleTools objects which will be a bolt-on and will not interfere with delivered objects.
• Minimize the customization footprint by replacing customizations when similar functionality becomes available with new delivered features from PeopleSoft.
• Track all customizations and import them into new PeopleSoft Update images to identify impacts on new features and maintenance.
• How new PeopleSoft functionality is rolled out to a business.
• Roll out small incremental changes rather than a large single release to business and the user community. You can take on as many new enhancements into your environment as you want. However, you do not have to roll them all out to the end-users at once.
• Be proactive with change management by putting out quick reference guides or by leveraging dynamic training materials such as PeopleSoft User Productivity Kit (UPK). This will assist your users and walk them through the delivered processes so that they can understand new features and functions quicker and easier.

Summary: The business of enterprise software has evolved to move away from costly cyclical upgrades to a more streamlined incremental change model. PeopleSoft embraced this change by moving to a Continuous Delivery model. Early adopters have found significant improvements in maintenance and are gearing up for the application of new enhancements. A case in point - one of SmartERP’s customers in the healthcare industry eliminated customizations they had done on document attachments after applying a new image. Another recent example on the benefits of using selective adoption was how SmartERP helped a customer address a critical issue in the Oracle-PeopleSoft Finance Accounts Receivable Module where the AR UPDATE process failed at AR UNPOST. On analysis, SmartERP found this to be an issue in Image 5 with the already available fix in Image 7. We could selectively extract the bug resolution from Image 7 and successfully apply to resolve the issue reported. Again, with the selective adoption strategy customer could save time and effort by applying only the required patch as opposed to the previous model of applying the entire bundles or maintenance packs. With this new incremental change model, new opportunities are available for businesses that have never had such models available to them. It is the proactive business that embraces change that will benefit the most and see the rewards.