This presentation about Managing Meaningful Change is presented by Floyd M. Teter, Aliasgar Khambhaty, and Shweta Ganguly. Teter is a Senior Director at the Center of Excellence in Oracle HCM Development. Khambhaty is a Senior Director at Oracle Product Management. Ganguly is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle Product Management.

The Bookends Experience are the two great experiences we give to employees at Onboarding and Offboarding.  Onboarding involves orientation, a career coach, issuing of a computer, gift of a backpack with the logo, and other things to enthusiastically bring the employee on board. Offboarding involves rating the manager, discussing which competitor they will be joining, and returning all the items that were given at onboarding.  But what about the meaningful things that happen in the middle?

The vision for Oracle Cloud Journeys includes five key points. There is a desire for there to exist a consumer-grade 21st-century experience platform. In addition, creating a multi-step set of processes for employees is also a key point. The ability to manage careers, manage tasks, and deal with change are also key aspects for Journeys. Also, the ability to manage the bookends and the middle. Most importantly, is to manage all of these things in simple, yet meaningful and empathetic ways.

Journeys consists of The Journeys Launchpad, The Journeys Creator, and The Journeys Boosters. The Journeys Launchpad is where a worker finds journeys tasks assigned to themselves.  It is also where a line manager finds journeys and tasks assigned to their direct reports.  An HR Admin finds journeys and tasks within their scope of responsibility.  The Journeys Creator is a user interface that allows HR teams and managers to create, modify, and assign Journeys. Users will be able to create a new journey by using a pre-defined journey as a base or create brand new journeys from scratch. The Journeys Boosters is a collection of tools for extending Journeys either via personalization, extension, or integration into third-party apps.  The boosters include Visual Builder Studio, HR Help Desk, and the Oracle Process Automation Cloud. Journeys Launchpad is currently available in 21A, while the Journeys Creator and Journeys Booster are on the near-term roadmap.

There are numerous benefits to utilizing Journeys. Journeys supports all categories and has a predefined enterprise onboarding category and user-defined checklist categories. All Journeys are in a single place and there are filter chips for faster searching. There is also an ease of task navigation and completion. Additionally, there is support for user-defined images on the landing page. Each journey can have its own page. There is also a significant increase in scope beyond traditional use of checklists.

Steps to Get Started with Oracle Cloud Journeys

1. Go to Setup and Maintenance
2. Search for and click the Manage Administrator Profile Values task
3. Search for and select ORA_PER_JOURNEYS_ENABLED
4. Change the Profile Value from N to Y
5. Click Save and Close

The following is a recommended approach to get started. Enable Journeys in a non-production pod such as 21A or 21B.  You must test and evaluate by creating a few Journeys and executing them. It may make sense for you to enable Journeys in Production now or it will make sense as they incrementally roll out new features over the next few updates. It is also important to consider the wider scope that it is in addition to HCM, orchestration with other Oracle pillars, ODA, HR HelpDesk, Opportunity Marketplace, third-party apps, and custom apps.

There are several important pieces of information to keep in mind in regards to Journeys. 21A is the first release and Journeys isn’t a UX lift and shift from Checklists.  It is built from the ground up using Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service. It is essential not to compare feature by feature with Responsive UX Onboarding and Checklists. Images are managed by the Visual Builder Studio (21B).  Some of the less frequently used MSS/HR features will be targeted for future releases. Assign Journey, Delete Journey, Force Close Journey, Add Task, Add Task from Library, Edit Journey, and Edit Task aren’t available in the Journeys user interface yet. There are no mass actions yet for line managers and HR specialists to perform in the Journeys user interface. Finally, Creating Journeys via the UI will be introduced no sooner than 21C, but you can upload your own Journeys created via a template. When Journeys is enabled, users cannot access the apps for Onboarding and Checklist tasks. You can switch back to Responsive UX by resetting the Profile Option to N. Additionally, Journey needs the following security privileges: Employee, Contingent Worker, Pending Worker, Line Manager, Human Resource Specialist, Human Resource Analyst.

There are several things to keep in mind in regard to impact analysis. The tools and UI is new but the building blocks are the same. There isn’t any change to the data model therefore existing configuration is honored and there is no change to notifications, reports, HDL, HSDL, REST.  You will need to consider if you need to update any of your custom training materials, redo any label personalization, want to change the default background images that appear for Journeys, or need to review and adjust your automated testing if any.

Cloud Journeys Roadmap

The Journeys Roadmap will consist of the following; It will become the de-facto application by the end of 2021, replacing Onboarding, Checklist Tasks, and Allocate Checklists quick action.  Expect to see additional delivered Journeys introduced through the next several updates; 20 appearing soon on Customer Connect.  Post 21A, no further enhancements to existing UI’s for Onboarding, Checklist Tasks, and Allocate Checklists pages.  IMPORTANT: Journeys offers insight into two important developments: 1) Built with Visual Cloud Builder Service using Oracle JET- no ADF (coming soon to HCM apps as Visual Builder Studio)  2) A key component of the Oracle Employee Experience Platform.