Emily Crow from Choctaw Nation recently sat down as a part of Quest’s Cloud HCM Week to reveal how her organization handles Oracle Cloud HCM release management in hopes to help other customers leverage what she’s learned so that other customers can apply it to their own releases and enjoy a streamlined approach to successful release management. While every business is different, these tips can help mitigate risk and offer valuable insights into handling releases and testing.

Cloud HCM Release Management Tips from Choctaw Nation

Choctaw Nation went live with Cloud HCM in January 2020. They currently run HCM Core HR, Benefit, Talent, Recruiting, Learning, Compensation, Payroll, and Journey.

The team at Choctaw Nation has specific activities assigned to various stages. Their testing cycle is split into three phases:

1. Lower Environment Drop Preparation
2. Lower Environment Drop
3. Post-Production Drop.

Each phase of the Choctaw Nation release management process is described step-by-step below:

 Phases of Choctaw Nation Cloud HCM Release Management

Lower Environment Drop Preparation Steps

1. Review the release notes for relevance and feasibility with the entire team.
   1. Relevance questions to answer:
      1. Do we use this module?
         1. If so, do we use this feature?
      2. Does this release note affect us and our environment?
   2. Feasibility questions to answer:
      1. If this is manually enabled, would it work for our business processes, customers, configurations, etc.?
         1. If it doesn’t work with configurations, we won’t offer it.
      2. Create test plans for auto-enabled features and recurring manual test scripts.
         1. The team treats quarterly updates like an internal project. They have a test plan, and every test script is a step in the plan so that it can be marked off individually. They track progress on each script.
      3. Send manually-enabled features to business partners to review/prioritize.
         1. These are feasible and relevant—business partners in finance, procurement, and HR will look at the features to determine if they want them.
         2. If features are wanted, each one is given a priority rating by the business partners.
      4. Complete environment refresh and data staging.
         1. Complete data masking for an automated testing vendor.
         2. Complete standard refresh for Choctaw.
            1. Choctaw does data staging in these environments. Because of the business complexity at Choctaw, they must stage a lot of data.
         3. Project managers schedule internal testing sessions.

The initial meeting to review release notes is important to include everyone that will be needed for the drop. Choctaw’s meeting includes system analysts, HCM Support team, HCM Project Team, all SMEs for various modules, project managers, change management team, and the internal training team—in case of changes to trainings, etc.

Lower Environment Drop

1. Begin internal testing: E2E scenarios, auto-enabled new functionality, additional scripts.
   1. Support team tests internally. If issues are identified, they put in an SR with Oracle immediately.
2. Simultaneously, business partners begin testing mission critical and additional scripts.
3. Review reports from testing vendor.

Post-Production Drop

1. Begin testing manually-enabled new functionality by priority.
2. Go over lessons Learned for next quarter.
   1. Ask: What can we improve for next quarter?

Key Takeaways

By taking this approach, Choctaw has mitigated the risk of anything being missed. To date, they’ve only had one issue that caused a request to delay to drop to production, but the delay was denied because it didn’t actually affect functionality. Altogether, this process has proven very successful.

To hear everything Emily had to say, considering watching the full Cloud HCM Week session recording: HCM Cloud Community Release Management Roundtable.

For more on Oracle Cloud HCM, check out Quest’s Content Library.

To connect with other Cloud HCM users, you may considering joining Quest’s Cloud HCM Community.