PeopleSoft Upgrade Guide

DMT Solutions, Inc.
www.PeopleSoftCareer.com
Page 1 The Upgrade Planning Guide for PeopleSoft 9.2 Copyright 2013
Copyright 2013
Printed in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of any other party or parties. PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, PeopleCode, PeopleBooks and nVision are registered trademarks of Oracle / PeopleSoft Inc. This book is an independent creation of the author and has been published without license, authorization or participation of ORACLE. Information contained in this work had been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. However, neither DMT SOLUTIONS, INC. nor the author guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any information published herein and shall not be responsible for any errors, omissions, or damage arising from the use of this publication. This work is published with the understanding that DMT Solutions, Inc. and its authors are supplying information but are not attempting to render engineering or other professional services. If such services are required, the assistance of an appropriate professional should be sought. You are permitted to print one copy of this eBook for yourself. It is illegal to distribute or copy this book in any part.
Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 4 Acquire all Pertinent Upgrade Information ............................................................................................................................ 5 Training for your team .................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Determining Business Requirements & Critical Success Factors .................................................................................. 8 Retire those Customizations.................................................................................................................................................. 10 Thou Shalt Know Thy Customizations .............................................................................................................................. 10 Define Your Upgrade Plan ............................................................................................................................................................ 11 Technical Planning .................................................................................................................................................................... 11 Planning Your Project Team Requirements .................................................................................................................... 12 Create Your Project Plan ......................................................................................................................................................... 12 Defining Your Test Strategy ........................................................................................................................................................ 13 Why Test? ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 13 Put Together a Testing Strategy........................................................................................................................................... 13 Testing Requirements .............................................................................................................................................................. 13 Define Your Testing Strategy ................................................................................................................................................ 14 Unit Testing .................................................................................................................................................................................. 14 System Testing ............................................................................................................................................................................ 14 Integration Testing .................................................................................................................................................................... 15 Parallel Testing ........................................................................................................................................................................... 15 Performance Testing ................................................................................................................................................................ 15 User Acceptance Testing ......................................................................................................................................................... 15 Regression Testing .................................................................................................................................................................... 16 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 16
INTRODUCTION
This Planning guide was written primarily for upgrade managers; however, this document will benefit any project team member in a technical or functional role. The purpose of this guide is to provide you with information that will assist you in getting started planning for your upgrade and installing the new release. A PeopleSoft upgrade is no minor feat. There is a lot of planning and decision making that must go into the upgrade process. Does my current hardware meet the minimum requirements? Do I need to upgrade my O/S? How about my Database Software? Also, there are many other factors to consider like what people will be involved? What testing strategy will be used? What kind of training is needed and how many people need to go? The bottom line is that planning is the essential Key to a successful upgrade. There are several planning tasks that are necessary for a successful upgrade. Be sure you have an adequate plan and task outline completed before you start your upgrade project. These plans and task outlines will help you in assessing your business requirements, technical requirements, implementation/upgrade team requirements, and in defining other project considerations. From a high level, here are the major planning activities that need to be performed. 1. Acquire all pertinent upgrade information and materials 2. Training for your team 3. Determining Business Requirements 4. Producing a Fit Gap Analysis 5. Layout your technical requirements 6. Define the upgrade plan 7. Define and layout your testing Strategy 8. Make sure you fully understand the process
Once your organization had made the decision to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.2, you will need to choose your upgrade path. This can easily be done by comparing your current version of the application with the certified upgrade paths defined by PeopleSoft. Depending on how old your release is, you may find that you need to make your upgrade a multi-version upgrade. With this out of the way you are ready to obtain the necessary information.
ACQUIRE ALL PERTINENT UPGRADE INFORMATION

The very first step to successful information gathering is a visit to Oracle Support's PeopleSoft Upgrade Section. This section will supply all of the necessary information and notices for each release. This is also where you will find the certified upgrade path for your release. You will need an Oracle Support account to access these documents. Release Value Proposition Prerelease Notes
Next you will download the upgrade documentation for your upgrade path. This document will contain all of the necessary steps for performing your upgrade. You will need to review this document to find specific instructions for planning your upgrade. Updates & Fixes seem to be another crucial step. Pay particular attention to any upgrades and fixes that are labeled as "Required for Install", or "Required for Upgrade." Skipping one of these required updates or fixes could result in an upgrade disaster. PeopleSoft upgrades uses the Change Assistant application to organize and automate the upgrade tasks. This application is template driven containing the pertinent steps for your upgrade process and ensuring that you run them in the specific order as instructed by PeopleSoft. These templates execute set scripts and application engine programs that will be used to convert your data. Download the latest release of the Change Assistant and the associated scripts and programs. Be sure to also download the UPGCONVERT project that will be later loaded into your PeopleSoft
Application Designer. Note: In version 8.52 PeopleSoft has introduced the Update Manager to make this easier for you. The PeopleSoft Update Manager provides is supposed to help you reduce time, effort, and cost of application maintenance. The way it works is that PeopleSoft will deliver the most current PeopleSoft applications code and objects in the form of a PeopleSoft Update Image on a Virtual Machine on a regular basis. Then the PeopleSoft Update Manager will use tools like the Change Assistant and Change Packager and give you an easy way to select what you want to patch to your environment. The benefits of this are: Your environment does not have to be current on maintenance. You can select a single fix and have the system automatically find the needed prerequisites to go with that fix. You can get current on fixes by having the system generate a custom change package that suits the current state of your environment. Now that you have downloaded and reviewed the pertinent information and materials for your upgrade, be sure to review them, and then review them, and then review them again. If you think I just repeated myself I did, for a very good reason. Project managers, and technical team leads must know the upgrade process before starting it. In addition to this information, it is an excellent idea to download and study all PeopleSoft whitepapers on the new features of the version you are upgrading to. Other Resources and Links to stay informed are:
Applications Strategy Blog Legislative Updates Blog PeopleTools and Technology Blog Twitter Facebook LinkedIn YouTube
Now that you understand that the first step in this upgrade process is to make sure that you are well educated. The next step will be to ensure the proper education and training of your Upgrade team. This will include the education of the Upgrade process and the required training to help your team be successful in upgrading.
TRAINING FOR YOUR TEAM

Next, I would like to make mention of another crucial step in the upgrade process. This step has to deal with Training Your Team. Your PeopleSoft upgrade project team members will require training at one level or another. Furthermore, these team members are the key to a fast and smooth upgrade, so you want to make sure they get the proper knowledge and skills necessary to upgrade successfully. Your team members will need the more training than anyone else and it is crucial that they get it early in the project planning and deployment process and not during the upgrade. So where do you start to find the right training for you or your team? You can start with the Oracle Support website or you can visit Oracle University to schedule formal training. In addition you can find a great series of overview videos on the latest 9.2 features on Oracle's You Tube channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/PSFTOracle?feature=mhee and the PeopleSoft Information Portal - http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/054275.html Oracle / PeopleSoft has designed a road map for the specific training your team members will need. They have several guides to training courses that are designed to easily let you see what training is needed for a specific role. These guides contain a list of the most common roles in your upgrade project team and the training courses that would best develop the skills required for that role. Remember, if you want to upgrade to the latest release of PeopleSoft 9.2 successfully, you want to make sure that your Upgrade team is adequately trained to ensure a smooth upgrade. Failure for your team to understand what they are doing will result in a loss in time, production and money. All
things you can't afford on an upgrade project.
DETERMINING BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS & CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

Do you know what the Critical Success Factors (CSF) are for your upgrade? Why are you upgrading in the first place? I know many of you will say "because we have to or we will lose support," but I'm sure that some of you are upgrading for other business reasons. In addition to this, Oracle has extended the 9.0 support through June of 2015. Perhaps you want to reduce costs, or implement new Talent Management functionality or Self Service features. Perhaps you want to extend you application to your customers, suppliers, and partners. Or, maybe you want to implement employee and manager self-service and save big on HR and Payroll administrative costs. Whatever the business reason, it is crucial that you know your CSF and the associated risk factors. By doing so, you will be able to manage your entire upgrade project like a Pro! One of the first ways that you can define your business requirements is to establish your upgrade budget and know it before you start. Next is to make a timeline for your implementation listing your CSF's and your milestones. Finally, establishing the scope of your project is also crucial in ensuring you are successful. All of these are necessary steps in determining your Business Requirements. Defining the scope of your upgrade project is important so that your team and members outside of your team understand what you are doing and stay within the confines of that scope. For example, be sure to list the number of team members, how much technical and functional analysis is involved, how many databases you will use and the name & function of each. Other factors to consider in your scope are, knowing the scope of training your end users and managers, knowing how much testing and what level will be done, listing any new customizations that you will add during the upgrade, documenting the new features and modules that you will be taking advantage of in the new release. Are you getting the idea of what a scope is? Next, lets talk money and budget! Face it! You can't just do what you want, take how long you
want, and bring in 1,000 consultants to do the job! If you've been involved in the PeopleSoft world long enough then you know that it used to be that way in the 90's. However, those days are long gone and you need to ensure that you stay within a budget and get a return on your investment of upgrading to PeopleSoft 9.2. After all, the bean counters in your company have limited the amount of money you can spend by approving a budget, especially in this economy! What? You haven't created a budget yet? You better start now and get going, because you may have to acquire new hardware, software, outside resources, training etc. It is essential to identify these items and create a budget for your project. Doing so, will help you to better plan and manage your project so you won't have to stop in the middle of the project to get approval to by another server or piece of software. Lastly, make sure you create a project timeline that shows your start date, end date, and major milestones. Be sure to treat your upgrade the same way you would treat any corporate initiative or project. For most companies, the average time to upgrade to HCM 9.2 will take approximately 3 to 4 months and 3 to 6 months for Financials. However, if you have a lot of customizations, and you are planning on adding new functionality, you can add a few more months. Some upgrade projects that include the addition of new modules take as long as a year. Make sure that you list target dates and milestones and associate your CSF's where applicable. All of these guidelines and tasks are extremely important in identifying your Business Requirements to ensure a successful upgrade. And even more importantly, you will be successful! Producing a Fit Gap Analysis So far, we have discussed the various requirements and information gathering stages. Here is where we start to roll up our sleeves and do some analysis against our current version of the application and the new release of the application. This is called a Business Fit Gap Analysis. Got Customizations? Well if you have a lot of customizations and you are embarking upon an upgrade from an earlier release, this task will be very important. You will start by looking at the release note and comparing
them to your current customizations. In doing so, you will find the various fits and gaps between your customizations and the new features and changes you found in the release notes. Take your time to carefully identify all of your customizations and compare the current release functionality with the new functionality in the new version. Oracle provides a release comparison HCM Cumulative Feature Overview Tool which will compare your current release with the new one and give you all of the new features.
RETIRE THOSE CUSTOMIZATIONS

Now, this is what you either love or hate to do, but it will work to your advantage, for years to come, if you do it right. During this step is where you get to make all kinds of decisions on whether to dump or keep your customizations. Why would you want to dump them? Because, if you find that your customization has been replaced with a delivered functionality or component, you will want to keep the delivered and dump your customization to save you countless hours in maintenance and upgrades, both now and in the future. To Re-Customize or Not to Re-Customize?? You should identify as many opportunities as you can, to retire those high-maintenance customizations and accept the new delivered functionality that replaces them. While doing this, make sure that you examine both the online and batch components that you have customized. For Batch reporting, look at your reports, interfaces, and batch programs that you customized for your business needs. For online components, look at pages, PeopleCode, records, menus, fields, etc. to determine the differences in your customizations and your new release.
THOU SHALT KNOW THY CUSTOMIZATIONS

Most importantly, be certain that you know your customizations like the back of your hand. If you have done it right, then you will already have the documentation for all of your customizations. If not, well then get busy! You need to know your customizations to perform a successful fit gap analysis. So, Know Thy Customizations! Finally, if you can, try to obtain the same project team members for your upgrade that you used in your implementation and throughout the lifecycle of your installation. This can save you a countless
number of hours during your upgrade. In our next article we will discuss the planning of your technical requirements.
DEFINE YOUR UPGRADE PLAN

So far, we have discussed the various requirements and information gathering stages, we have also discussed the Business Fit Gap Analysis of our current version of the application and the new release of the application. Now we will discuss Planning, Planning, and Planning. Did I mention Planning? Now that you have gathered this enormous amount of information and performed your business fit gap analysis, you should be knowledgeable and prepared enough to start planning and putting together your Project plans. There are really 3 steps of planning that we need to highlight. First, you need to perform Technical planning. This will include planning for your technical requirements and performing a Technical Fit Gap analysis. Second, you need to plan your project team requirements, identifying key personnel and resources. Finally, you will create your detailed project plan. We have even included a sample project plan for you to use.
TECHNICAL PLANNING
In order to efficiently perform your upgrade as smoothly as possible, you need to perform a review and analysis of your current hardware and software components that make up your current PeopleSoft application. You should document this information in a spreadsheet or other format and then compare this information with new release Hardware and Software requirements. This is the information you downloaded in an earlier step. Once you perform this comparison you will be able to see the Gaps in your technical environment and discover what needs to be aqcuired to meet the new requirements. Now, here is some important information for capacity planning. When you perform an upgrade you will need a vast amount of file and database disk space for holding multiple copies of your database. Therefore, be sure to plan for at least three times the size of your current production database with room for several backups of these databases. Furthermore you will require about twice the amount of File Server space that you utilize in production today. And, it is most important that your upgrade
server have the appropriate processing power, memory, and that it is properly configured for a large amount of batch processing.
PLANNING YOUR PROJECT TEAM REQUIREMENTS

If you have ever performed a PeopleSoft upgrade or implementation, then you know that it requires key personnel and resources to make necessary business decisions and to be able to identify customizations and other business requirements. So you will need to identify these Key resources and create a resource plan accordingly. If you have the members of your implementation still on hand, make sure you target these individuals as the key members of your project team. Their knowledge is extremely valuable. Make sure that you clearly define their roles and determine the amount of time they will be able to commit to the upgrade project. Your project will need a Project Manager, Technical Upgrade Specialist, Installer, DBA, Network Admin, System Admin, Developer, and Functional Resources. Once you identify each of these key role players, create a resource plan that documents their roles, their skills, any external assistance you need, and any additional training that is required for these team members. After the resource plan is completed, you can start to establish your working upgrade environment for your team. This will include workstations, phones, email groups, supplies, dedicated shared file directories, and anything that is needed for the team to be successful. Finally, make sure you identify and establish standards for your upgrade project. These standards will ensure that your team works with documentation, issue management, communication, documentation of issues, and change control procedures.
CREATE YOUR PROJECT PLAN

Now that you have identified and documented your gap fit analysis, key team members, roles, resources, technical requirements, and standards you are ready to create a detailed project plan that is specific to your environment. The best way to do this is to utilize your documentation of the business fit gap analysis, the technical fit gap analysis, and the Upgrade instructions. This will allow you to create an outline of the detailed tasks that are required to execute the upgrade. You will also need to include testing and end user training in this process.
DEFINING YOUR TEST STRATEGY

Although, you will not be performing the testing until a later time in your upgrade project, you will need to define the testing strategy before the project begins or soon after. Your testing strategy will provide the basis for understanding how you will test your newly upgraded applications. There are several points within the technical upgrade process where your developers will unit test programs, but the majority of testing will occur after your application has been upgraded. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a plan, early in the project, for the testing strategies that you will perform.
WHY TEST?
Testing your database after you have completed the upgrade ensures that you can still operate your day-to-day processes on your newly upgraded release of your application. Therefore, your testing strategy should be based on these day-to-day processes and you should involve the users and functional leads that perform these processes. But first, lets talk strategy!
PUT TOGETHER A TESTING STRATEGY

An effective testing strategy will require that you have a pretty solid understanding of the different stages of a PeopleSoft Upgrade. There are certain key stop-points or stages where certain testing should be performed. It is extremely important to know where these stages are, and when the testing should be performed. The project manager and upgrade specialist should identify these stages. Some of the stages will include testing the integrity of the data and meta-data structures within the PeopleSoft applications, specifically after upgrading PeopleTools and also when copying upgrade projects from your demo database to your copy of production. These steps are outlined in the upgrade instructions and usually include running and reviewing your DDDAUDIT and SYSAUDIT reports from your copy of production. You will verify that the system is working properly by reviewing the system online. After you are comfortable that the system is working properly, you can perform the Test Move to Production.
TESTING REQUIREMENTS
There is more than one approach and method you can take for testing your upgrade and you should
evaluate your requirements by gathering key information about your applications and environment. Here are some basic questions to ask: How many products and modules do you currently have in your production database? How many customizations you have in your production database? What you need to test?
DEFINE YOUR TESTING STRATEGY

Once you have evaluated your testing requirements, you will determine the type of testing you need. Use the testing type definitions below, defined from the PeopleSoft upgrade instructions, to determine the levels of testing required for your applications in your organization. Sometimes, certain organizations may not require all testing stages listed. Every organization will develop their testing strategy slightly differently from others, as each organization is unique. The testing types below do not necessarily run systematically, one after another. Different test conditions can sometimes run in parallel. Review the following testing types. Define what you will need for each testing type.
UNIT TESTING
In this stage of testing, you have completed your upgrade tasks. Your database is now at the new release level. However, you will want to unit test before you use the new system. You will test your logon process. In addition, you will test to ensure that you can access existing data and enter new data successfully. During this phase you will test individual transactions and processes of your application. In addition, you will be testing customizations, and verifying access to data and pages. There is no need for testing scripts in this phase.
SYSTEM TESTING
This stage of testing ensures that all your functionality works together. In addition, the test
eliminates conflicts with old and new customizations. In this phase, you will use a full functioning and separate testing environment to test all business processes, interfaces, batch programs, security, reports, and customizations. This phase will require testing scripts to follow and record the results. You should not move on to the next phase unless this is successful.
INTEGRATION TESTING
In this stage, you will test to ensure that your business processes work as designed. In addition, you will ensure that any design flaws are resolved before User Acceptance Testing. This stage is optional but is very useful in that you can perform a test move to production that creates a new environment. Then, you can test all of the integration points between modules, and external applications.
PARALLEL TESTING
This stage of testing is optional and is mostly used for those customers with extensive Payroll customizations and setup. During the upgrade, you would be performing parallel tests throughout all testing stages to ensure that your upgrade was successful.
PERFORMANCE TESTING
This stage of testing measures your current system performance against the new release level performance. Youll want to monitor the performance during this phase and even perform load testing, if necessary.
USER ACCEPTANCE TESTING

In this stage of testing, you validate your data, business rules, and business processes requirements. You will also define the acceptance criteria for your upgrade. This is where your end users and business process owners will run through all of the test scripts and execute key business processes such as hiring, terminating, paying, etc. This phase should require testing scripts and an issue resolution process to resolve any open issues.
REGRESSION TESTING
This stage of testing validates the test move to production and move to production parts of the upgrade. You have now finished developing your testing strategy and you should document this information thoroughly, because you will use it later in the upgrade process when you complete the upgrade of your copy of production.
CONCLUSION
This upgrade planning guide should give you enough information to start planning, training and putting together a solid project plan, testing strategy, and testing plan for a successful upgrade. We covered the following topics. 1. Acquire all pertinent upgrade information and materials 2. Training for your team 3. Determining Business Requirements 4. Producing a Fit Gap Analysis 5. Layout your technical requirements 6. Define the upgrade plan 7. Define and layout your testing Strategy 8. Make sure you fully understand the process
I hope this guide was useful to you. If you would like to provide me with your feedback and/or provide me with a suggestion of other topics you would like me to create, please send me your feedback at http://dmtsolutions.zendesk.com

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DMT Solutions, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

ACQUIRE ALL PERTINENT UPGRADE INFORMATION

TRAINING FOR YOUR TEAM

things you can't afford on an upgrade project.

DETERMINING BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS & CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

RETIRE THOSE CUSTOMIZATIONS

THOU SHALT KNOW THY CUSTOMIZATIONS

DEFINE YOUR UPGRADE PLAN

PLANNING YOUR PROJECT TEAM REQUIREMENTS

CREATE YOUR PROJECT PLAN

DEFINING YOUR TEST STRATEGY

PUT TOGETHER A TESTING STRATEGY

DEFINE YOUR TESTING STRATEGY

USER ACCEPTANCE TESTING

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