Selective Adoption is the term used to describe PeopleSoft’s new application lifecycle process. It is used with 9.2 PeopleSoft product line and the 9.1 Interactive Hub. Maintenance and new features are delivered throughout the year in PeopleSoft Update Images. The Images are downloaded to your site, and you can search through them and only choose the maintenance and features that you want to deploy in your system. This is very different than the old maintenance process that featured sequential bundles and costly upgrades every several years.

To get the most out of Selective Adoption, you must first understand what it is and what went into making it. Selective Adoption is an entirely different way of approaching maintenance and updates. This episode in the PeopleSoft Spotlight Series will cover the following topics:

• Understanding Selective Adoption
• Building a Proactive Organization Plan
• Providing additional resources

Goals for Selective Adoption

PeopleSoft has established a list of goals that they hope to accomplish with Selective Adoption. These goals include:

• Incrementally delivering new enhancements (from years to weeks)
• Eliminating major upgrades (smaller upgrades)
• Allowing customers to take only what they want, when they want it
• Retaining strategic customizations

Old Delivery Model vs. Selective Adoption

There are several significant differences between the old and new PeopleSoft delivery models. The old model consisted of bundles and upgrades that required frequent maintenance, forced customers to take all of the new features made available, and encouraged users to constantly get current. With Selective Adoption, you still have frequent maintenance but are able to do selective maintenance and are in control of your strategy.

With the old model, there were infrequent enhancements, major upgrades every three to four years, and no incremental changes. With the new model, there are frequent enhancements, no major upgrades, and incremental changes two to three times a year.

Creating a Proactive Organization

A proactive organization will create the internal business processes, practices, and relationships that will help optimize the benefits of the new delivery model during the planning and analysis, system implementation, and rollout phases. You’ll need to come up with a Proactive Organization Plan that includes:

• Changing your mindset
• Creating an annual schedule
• Staying on a current version of PeopleTools
• Automating your testing
• Rolling out incremental change

Changing your mindset is instrumental to the success of your Proactive Organization Plan. You must change your mindset from old to new. In the old mindset, business processes drove software and customizations were readily available. However, in the new mindset, the delivered process is the basis of software and customizations are more disciplined.

Some additional components of the old mindset include:

• Deferred maintenance
• Focus on optimizing transactions
• Static business systems

Key components of the new mindset you need to move to include:

• Frequent maintenance
• Focus on optimizing the system
• Agile business systems

When transitioning to the new mindset, work with everyone to help them understand and adopt the change. You’ll need to reinforce the need for change and the value that it will bring. Remember that none of this is easy or automatic, but it will be worth it in the end.

Creating an annual schedule is also essential to the success of your Proactive Organization Plan. The schedule should cover maintenance, new features, and customizations. Maintenance includes bugs, legs/regs, and staying current. Keeping your system in an agile state that is ready to take on change will help you better keep up with maintenance. This will help endure maintenance with as little disruption as possible. The longer you go without maintenance, the more difficult it will be to apply critical fixes and new features because dependency requirements will get too large. Enhancements should also be evaluated and rolled out incrementally. An example schedule for maintenance and new feature adoption might look something like this:

You will also need to stay on a current version of PeopleTools. PeopleTools updates are the same as they have always been. PeopleTools license says you receive full support for 12 months after the next release and limited support for an additional 12 months. However, you may be required to be on a supported version in order to apply maintenance.

Creating a plan for automating your testing is another vital component of your success because testing is the largest part of any project. Start your regression test by:

• Automating the testing of mature products
• Having functional users design tests and technical users build and run tests
• Implementing a test documentation policy

You must build repeatable, portable tests by migrating test environments, page prompting, scroll prompting to identify by key not index, and cross-reference reports.

Rolling out incremental change will also be key to the success of your Proactive Organization Plan. Understanding what is coming and what is already available. There are two ways for a business analyst to keep up with planned and available features in PeopleSoft:

1. Planned Features and Enhancements page in My Oracle Support
2. Cumulative Features Overview (CFO) tool

The Planned Features and Enhancements page can be accessed through My Oracle Support or the PeopleSoft Information Portal. The page will give you all of the information about new product features in each application that you are running. You can select a specific product area within the application to view new or planned features that apply to that area. Selecting an item will show you more details about the feature. This helps you gauge what PeopleSoft is working on and considering for the future.

The Cumulative Feature Overview (CFO) tool has been around for quite a while but may have some new features that you aren’t aware of. This tool is used to do a fit-gap analysis for PeopleSoft applications. It lets users quickly understand any major changes that have occurred across multiple releases for any given product or Tools release. When you’re in the tool, select the product line you are interested in into the list of available products. Choose the available products that you are interested in and use the arrow buttons to move them over to the Selected Products column. Choose your current release and target release that you want to generate a compare report for. The report will show all features that have been added from the time of your current release up to your target release.

You will need to work with IT and LOB owners to keep them informed about what is available what the impacts are. Develop short-term and long-term adoption plans and identify enhancement priorities.

Next Steps

Proactive organizations will gain the most from Selective Adoption. Follow these steps moving forward to become and more proactive organization and implement your Selective Adoption strategy today:

• Take the time to respond to the new way PeopleSoft delivers maintenance and enhancements.
• Look at your internal processes and evaluate them based on the new delivery model.
• Develop new working relationships between IT and LOB.

For more information on best practices for implementing a Selective Adoption strategy within your organization, check out the video and additional Quest resources below.