As part of the PeopleSoft HCM Configuration Series, Hannah Gacey and Mike Betschart from King County spoke about King County’s integrated release set and approach to customization management. In 2015, King County adopted a release set delivery strategy to align human capital management (HCM) system updates with PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) Image releases. This strategy has been refined over the years to keep King County current with the latest available Images and give users access to the latest features and functionality.

During the presentation, Gacey and Betschart discussed King County’s approach to Images, how King County is creating a culture of innovation by actively managing customizations, utilizing Event Mapping to using testing automation, and implementing release sets every six to eight weeks.

About King County

King County is working to integrate its release set strategy with customization management. After implementing PeopleSoft in 1999, King County has honed its use of tools and features. They upgraded to 9.2 in 2014 on Image 9 and began a release set strategy in 2015. King County is currently on full Image 29 with selections through Image 32. The strategy has evolved into a detailed, efficiency-producing approach. There are plans in place to integrate this release set with customization management, as detailed below.

The Business Resource Center at King County is a division within the Department of Executive Services, which is responsible for providing the functional and technical support for King County’s PeopleSoft, Oracle BI, and Oracle EBS systems. King County, located in Washington, is the thirteenth largest county in the United States. Composed of 27 agencies, 60+ lines of business, and 15000+ employees supported by around 80 collective bargaining agreements, King County paid $1.3 billion in taxable wages in 2018 and has an $11 billion biennial budget.

King County’s Release Set Methodology

A release set for King County is a grouping of PeopleSoft deliverables (PUM update/CSRs) with a common implementation date. The various types of Release Sets include:

• CSR (in-house) only
• Selective
• Full Image
• PeopleTools

Annual Outlook

The annual outlook is based on workload and the timing of Oracle’s delivery of images. Annual planning is a best guess. Adjust as necessary. Don’t be afraid to acknowledge your team’s limits and embrace new technologies such as PeopleSoft’s test framework or event mapping.

Each release follows a 1-2-3 naming convention:

1. 9.2
2. Image being pulled from
3. Number of times the image is used

An example of a resulting name is 9.2.028.03.

Visual Management

King County utilizes visual management to achieve goals. As displayed, a kanban board is paired with the CSR ticketing tracking system. It is in place to facilitate team communication and status updates. There is a visual presentation of all CSR work in progress. There are separate swim lanes for release sets, contracts, and configuration items to allow team members to see how individual work items may need coordination with other efforts.

The visual management system also enables team members to communicate which work items require leadership attention. On the left, colored magnets identify things that are:

• On deck
• On track
• Pushed to the next release
• Making headwind
• In need of management attention

The kanban board highlights opportunities for efficiency and resource capacity planning. King County has 15-minute stand-up meetings twice per week in which team members provide status updates regarding the work in progress.

Scope

With every release, the King County leadership team (supervisors, leads, and manager) meets to determine scope – What’s in? What’s out? This is Phase 1 of any release. These items can come from a change package, bug fix, enhancement, or project queued up from internal business owners, and they will travel through the entire lifecycle together. That is the beauty of a release set—compound interest. You get more testing bang for your buck.

If you are working a selective or full image release, the process starts with defining a change package. In the Update Manager Dashboard, you can pick and choose that which you wish to take.

Design Package

After scoping, the next step of any release set is to do a design package. This is reviewed to promote communication about which items are going in it together. It gives a summary of change in business owner language. This is not tech speak. It is a high-level business owner release summary. Altogether, it is a collaborative planning tool used by the functional team to identify delivery work as part of the design process.

Within the design package is a box for training and communication. It is helpful for the training staff and helpdesk to know what to expect. Security changes are also defined in the design package. This answers the question of if security will be impacted. Test planning answers occur here, as well: Does this require a full payroll? Does it require a full payroll parallel? Finally, are there any resource dependencies?

Collision Analysis and Retrofitting

The next step in a release set is Collision Analysis and Retrofitting. Collision analysis shows where new code conflicts with the current code. A collision inventory is taken so that every time an object is hit, it gets recorded. Retrofitting is the process of deciphering what code moves forward.

Testing Plan

The testing plan in place looks like this:

Business Summary

The next part of any given release set is communicating with business owners via the business summary. This is a very valuable document, as it creates a way to communicate the business value of the release set to the business owner. It also outlines the amount of time necessary to achieve tasks.

Cutover Dry Run / Go-Live

During the cutover dry run, which works as a full dress rehearsal, every single activity has been put in a cutover list. Each one has a resource and time assigned. All that’s left is the go-live!

Customization Management

With the capabilities of customization management, collision analysis at King County is no longer necessary. Customization management is a technical and functional collaboration. Oracle is delivering new ways to configure the system without customizing it. Event Mapping, Page and Field Configurator (PFC), data masking, Drop Zones, and more are available.

In the collision inventory is a full library of customizations and retrofits. New columns have been added to determine if the collision object should be addressed immediately, at a later date, or not at all.

The benefits of this new way of thinking include that it reduces future PUM application costs. It also eliminates future manual work. To this point, retrofitting has been the go-to approach. However, it becomes monotonous and inefficient. Customization Management allows King County to adopt industry-standard practices by leveraging delivered solutions. This also increases the ROI with the adoption of newly delivered features. Additionally, it grows the functional and technical knowledge for employees.

King County’s Goals for Customization Management

King County established the following goals for customization management:

• Add visibility to customizations for assessing business value and maintenance cost
• Remove low-value system customizations where possible
• Replace the strategic system customizations with delivered solutions
• Replace custom bug fixes with delivered solutions by leveraging Oracle Premier Support and the My Oracle Support Ideas Space
• Move custom code to Event Mapping configurations with the intent to eliminate vendor code collisions
• Visibility to cloned copies of objects with intent to reduce them

King County’s Customization Management Strategy

The customization management strategy is to integrate customization inventory management into the software development life cycle. While King County already has a rigid working release set strategy, they need to embrace customization inventories into this process to assess value. They want to track detailed customization inventory by module with cross-reference to specs and test scripts. They also want to identify opportunities for proactive and reactive customization reduction. Additionally, they would like to set up metrics including quarterly deprecation goals and prioritization of CSR items. Finally, King County hopes to build a customization tracking component in PeopleSoft which would achieve the following three objectives:

1. Enable management reporting and simplify metrics
2. Customize projects in App Designer
3. Create PTF coverage reports

There are two approaches to customization management—proactive and reactive.

The proactive approach includes assessing customizations on the customization inventory list to identify candidates for deprecation. Customization inventory lists will track opportunities for deprecating King County custom code from vendor projects such as Oracle bug fixes, business owner approval to remove, and Oracle solutions that can replace customizations.

A reactive approach would assess opportunities as a release set collision. This requires a collision strategy session, customization inventory management session, technical code assessment, and an assessment of whether or not the collision deprecation is possible. Functional prep will retrofit where possible. Moving something from old customization to a modern way of doing a configuration takes it off the vendor code line. King County is calling this transformation.

King County tried the new approach with Full Image 20 application in 2019. They identified 11 customizations for deprecation, 17 for transformation to event mapping, and 23 for retrofits. They will be building a customization tracking component in PeopleSoft in order to start tracking metrics. They will upgrade to PT 8.58 in fall 2020 for new features. As with any approach, they follow the Plan, Do, Check, Adjust format.

Quick Tips and Tricks

PeopleSoft offers alternatives to allow customization without modifying the delivered object.

King county uses these alternatives accordingly:

• Event Mappings for PeopleCode and related actions
  • Move KC custom code delivers PeopleCode to custom Application Packages then plug into the component at various event levels (e.g. component, record, page)
• Page and Field Configurator
  • Hide fields, change labels, make fields view only, make fields required, hide pages, etc.
  • Uses Event Mapping technology for simple configurations and creates the plug-in for you
• Drop Zones – Future Consideration
• PeopleTools 8.57 introduces a new flag that shows on then component through App Designer to indicate related Event Mappings – Future Consideration
• Data masking – in progress

Key Takeaway

Utilizing the release set strategy set forth by King County gives you the opportunity to achieve multiple solutions with one go-live. Items from change packages, bug fixes, enhancements, and more travel through the entire lifecycle together. Pair this with customization management tools to greatly improve efficiency. Code that has been impacted by several upgrades has the chance to be transformed and moved off of the vendor code line. Integration of release sets and customization management takes your old customizations and transforms them into modern configurations.