PeopleSoft Customer Shares PeopleSoft Test Framework Insights at BLUEPRINT 4D

Ken Palar is a Business Analyst III for Hennepin County, MN, and a PeopleSoft customer.  Ken has worked in a PeopleSoft environment for over a decade, in both finance and HR.  He presented one of the top attended customer-led sessions at this year’s BLUEPRINT 4D Conference in Dallas, TX!  His session, PTF – a Brief history at Hennepin County, lessons learned, and how to implement in your organization, dove into the lessons Ken has learned using PeopleSoft Test Framework.  The session included a background of testing framework, a look at Hennepin County’s implementation and how it has evolved over time, numerous lessons they have learned that could help others use the tool more effectively, and specific examples of the coding Hennepin County uses to ensure tests are repeatable and reusable.  Additionally, Ken provided a live demo of some of the real tests, Hennepin County uses.  Within the presentation, Ken shared that Hennepin County was struggling to fill some hard-to-recruit positions and started hiring student paid interns with a computer science backgrounds who work on recording and refining PTF tests.  Hennepin County can then develop these interns into programmers or business analysts – a win-win for their organization and the young professionals.  Ken hopes that attendees may be able to replicate this strategy.  He also hopes attendees were able to understand the difficulties Hennepin County encountered when using PTF in hopes that it could prevent the same things from happening in their organizations.

If you missed Ken’s session at the conference, you can watch the recording here: PTF – a Brief history at Hennepin County, lessons learned, and how to implement in your organization.

BLUEPRINT 4D Highlights

In addition to his own session, we asked Ken to highlight which BLUEPRINT 4D sessions she found to be most informative.  Here were his top picks:

1. How University of Colorado was able to stay safe, stay secure by applying security patches in 4 days, presented by Sridevi Bankupalli and Mayank Mittal, University of Colorado

In this session, Sridevi and Mayank shared their story of how and why they were able to decrease their CPU patching timeline from 10-14 days to four days.

Ken says this presentation was eye-opening to see what is possible and they can strive for at Hennepin County.

You can view the recording of this session here: How University of Colorado was able to stay safe, stay secure by applying security patches in 4 days.

2. Project Costing and Expenses Roundtable, presented by Joe Willever and Kelly Mills, Oracle

This roundtable included a discussion on the Enterprise Services Automation suite of products and provided attendees with the opportunity to interact with development and product strategy for Project Costing, Contracts, Grants and Expenses.

Ken says this roundtable was valuable because it focused on the area that he is most specialized, and he appreciated hearing the comprehensive view as to where Oracle is taking this area moving forward.

You can view the recording of this session here: Project Costing and Expenses Roundtable.

3. Customer Panel: Oracle Guided Learning, presented by Cameron McClurg, SpearMC, Ben Amster, City of Seattle, Darin Schorsch, State of North Dakota

In this session, customers who have migrated from traditional training documentation/content creation to using Oracle Guided Learning share their experience and how they’ve seen a reduction in support tickets.

Ken says that this session was great because it allowed him to see different sized organizations and their perspectives on the tool, showing the range OGL.

You can view the recording of this session here: Customer Panel: Oracle Guided Learning.

BLUEPRINT 4D Key Takeaways

In addition to sharing his knowledge with other customers and attending the sessions mentioned above at BLUEPRINT 4D, Ken also noted that other conference highlights included having the opportunity to connect face-to-face with Oracle personnel whom he’d previously been on calls with and networking with organizations that were geographically close to his.

Ken also appreciated the DEI sessions and events that were included in this year’s program.  Ken hopes that these events hopefully opened some eyes.

For a full list of PeopleSoft and DEI sessions at recordings at BLUEPRINT 4D, check out the BLUEPRINT 4D Event Hub on the Quest website.

BLUEPRINT 4D is back in Dallas in 2024, May 7^th – 10^th.  Don’t forget to save the date so you can attend in-person next year!