Session 3291 in the OAUG section.
I went to Sylvain Nguyen’s presentation on PeopleSoft global rollouts. Sylvain used to be a manager for PeopleSoft Global Financials development, and is now the CEO of Ataway. Ataway is a consulting company that specializes in PeopleSoft (note that we’ve worked with them before)
I came in about 15 minutes late, because the OAUG tracks are not sync-ed up with the Quest tracks timewise. Which is probably driven more by scheduling lunch for everyone here than anything else. Sylvain was in the middle of discussing the question “How can a global rollout be cost efficient, fast paced, and with quality when so many odds are stacked against it?”. This then led into a series of Dos and Don’ts.
Do
- Define template based global methodology
- Identify business leaders and analysts in the US and local countries
- Use local resources in the project team
- Start user requirement gathering before corporate business processes are mapped
- Underestimate the impacts of working with remote teams
- Trust psft features around global
- Prototype early as possible
- Involve local business leaders in review of designs. Implementation time is too late.
- Underestimate the impact on existing customizations
- Forget that production support will have to change to handle global users and requirements
- Identify and train local SME as early as possible
- Assign dedicated local support analysts
- Train the support team on the new processes and features
- Underestimate time and cultural differences in resolving problems.
- Think the project is over when the country is live.