Oracle e-business suite versions R11.x - time to upgrade

Computer Weekly article http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240219471/Businesses-face-Oracle-applications-support-timebomb

highlights the risks for clients currently using R11.x versions  and the challenges of upgrading to R12.x and the emerging Fusion offerings!

UK organisations running the older software will need to update their systems before 6 April 2015. After this date Oracle will no longer provide updates for changes in taxation and other legislation.

Upwards to the Cloud!

 

More businesses are moving their core business activities to the Cloud to stay competitive in the on-line word were clients require interactive solutions, with blended learning options and more dynamic support solutions.

Changefirst a change management consultancy who’s traditional model was to run client side training workshops costing several thousands of pounds plus travel costs to European or US destinations has recently transfer their change methodology and tools to the Cloud.

The clients are responding by encouraging more of their staff to log-on to the Cloud based solution to engage the Change Management tools when supporting or running projects. This represents a paradigm shift for the consultancy and the client but one that makes perfect commercial sense as more employees can be trained and supported through the project life cycle.

The solution delivers a number of key benefits over the traditional class room approach;

·         Users can select a number of proven change management tools ( 20 in total) from stakeholder analysis mapping to change agent readiness assessments

·         Each tool is supported by a bit size training course available in the knowledge pool

·         The assessments can be benchmarked against company, industry and over 500,000 data points within the solution

·         The assessments can be added to project plans and shared with colleagues in a country, region or globally

·         The solution allows users to build and access ‘communities’ and share or request information rather than ( see diagram below) where no one is on the same page, you have no clue who is working on what, work gets lost, you’re eating up funds, nothing is on time! This has been proved successful at AtTask a cloud based provider of project management tools.

·         An on-line tutoring and coaching facility can be accessed to further enrich the users experience and accelerate users allow the change management and project life cycle  learning curve. This has proved very successful Rosetta Stone as on-line coach

introduces you to real conversation in online sessions with language coaches who are native speakers. Supercharge your learning and experience everything communicating live has to offer.

 

Oracle Trusted Advisor

Oracle Trusted Advisor

Over the past twenty years Praktis Solutions has been supporting clients on their  Oracle journey’ implementing Oracle applications, databases, middleware and BI solutions. Our people joined because they wanted to get away from working with organisations such as Consultancies and System Integration who too often were involved in poor Oracle implementations.

The Oracle marketplace in the UK has seen Oracle Partners come and go, with many acquired by System Integrators and Consultancies. The small so called ‘boutique partners’ seem to survive because they are trusted by a handful of loyal customers

Listed below are prevailing factors which shape the UK marketplace:

1.       Oracle tends to recommend their preferred sector partners.

New clients are shocked to find out that Oracle does award Partner status based purely upon the quality of the consultants and more importantly referencable customers that have actively audited. Oracle manages their partners by focusing upon licence sales  

2.       It is mainly large SI’s (not experts) who respond to ITT’s.

The large SI’s have the resources to support large bid processes and often pull in a partner or contract resources to resource their delivery process . Clients fail to apply the required evaluation criteria and specifically, name the types of Oracle resources they require to underpin the delivery of their project

3.       Companies select their trusted Consultancy.

Management teams often feel more protected when selecting a consultancy with a long term track record in their organisation or industry sector. The old adage about ‘nobody got fired for buying Big Blue’. Many of these consultancies don’t employ dedicated Oracle professionals and tend to sell in expensive and more senior business consultants into a project.

4.       Turn to the Contactor market when the initial Project fails!

Sadly too many Oracle clients suffer at the first stage attempt to implement a solution and burn a significant proportion of their budget before turning to the contract market. The UK contract market is the place to find experienced and high quality functional and technical Oracle consultants. Why?

·         Not one  SI or Consultancy has sufficient market share to run multiple projects in any one year

·         The good contractors ‘don’t sit on the bench’ and are actively implementing new Oracle applications, functionality and technologies

Finding good quality Project Managers and Solution/Technical Architects in more of a challenge and these key resources ultimately define the success of the Oracle project

5.       Companies carry all the risks and fail to engage a Trusted Advisor

Implementing Oracle application and technologies can sometimes feel like you are at the ‘bleeding edge’ of technology or unique in the way your solution is being delivered. Employing a Trusted Advisor can provided the valuable insights you need to make the key decisions that shape your solution design confirm your build decisions and validate your implementation strategies. Independence of mind and with no commercial bias the Trusted Advisor can take you on a journey that avoids all the usually project pitfalls and temptations to customise Oracle!

 

The Future ‘must have’ Project Manager Role

The Future ‘must have’ Project Manager Role

Managing the delivery of a number of digital marketing projects for a client organisation

Key areas of activity include social media marketing, mobile marketing, search engine marketing, online PR, email marketing, online advertising, measurement and web analytics

 

So here’s a starting point

Do Projects adequately capture the change risks related to people?

How often do Project Managers build a Risk Register ( within  a RAID log) with the  intention of capturing all known project risks and specifically those related to managing change within the organisation but fail to engage the so called business change worksteam or transformation project/programme?

Well here's a useful tool called e-change from Changefirst which allows the busines team to perform risk assessments leading to the output of key risks.....all ready to be inserted in the risk register!

Sunday Telegraph article below
http://business-reporter.co.uk/2014/04/what-are-the-people-risks-in-change-projects/

e-change demo can be found here
http://www.changefirst.com/e-change

When Projects Fail and GO legal!

When Projects Fail and GO legal!

Sadly, seven out of ten projects fail. Some lead to customers taking their IT Partner (System Integrator, Consultancy Firm et al) to court to claim damages. The outcomes of such cases are rarely reported and many lead to compromise agreements. Obviously, both parties will not wish to ‘hand their dirty washing out in public’.

For the Project Manager community we never get to learn the lessons from such legal cases. So based upon my experience over the past ten years, I calculate that three projects out of every fifteen ended up in court.

So what went so badly wrong to land the respective parties in a court of law defending their respective positions?

1.       The respective parties expectations of each other failed to align and were only fully exposed at the end of the implementation. Sadly, often too late to address the underlying issues. I have witnessed organisations failing to take ownership and seemingly leaving it to the implementation partner to shoulder all the responsibilities for getting the project live. Hard to believe in 2014 when you would have assumed organisations are project savvy.

·         There is a case going through the courts now where an organisation requested significant customisations to an ERP solution and then blamed the implementation partner for poor quality code after the solution went live! So what went wrong (if anything) in the testing stages and perhaps more importantly why did the organisation fail to adopt the solution?

·   They failed to adequately invest in internal business project resources to support the key stages of testing and transition into live running

·   They failed to acknowledge the likely business impacts and then invest in business change resources to help the employees adopt the new ways of working enabled by the solution

 

2.       The solution fails in testing, possibly UAT and heavens forbid fails in live running. The solution fails for one or many reasons and doesn’t do what it says on the tin!

·         There is a case where a large organisation pulled the plug on a service management solution at the UAT stage having invested over £20m when they discussed that the ERP vendor had previously advised their System integrator that the proposed solution would not work a year earlier!

·   Avoid the bleeding edge projects!

·   Work closely with the application provider and their design/development  team

3.       The client bought a standard application solution but had to demand customisations that extended the scope of the project and led to major project overruns on time and cost

·         A recent case in the local government sector saw a consultancy firm challenged in the law courts for failing to manage the delivery of the solution with all the required customisations within the agreed budget (revised many times). Ironically, the consultancy firm had produced the original business case detailing a cost of implementation which the Council approved but then three years later and two behind schedule the cost had tripled. Why did they get it so wrong? They took a standard approach to delivering an ERP solution without realising the client had significant requirements that had not been fully identified, specified and validated  

o   Do the basics right!

o   Define your business requirements, document and valid them with your key managers and SME’s, who own them during the implementation lifecycle and beyond

o   Avoid the temptation to go with a template solution or process flow accelerators without stamping your organisation mark all over them!

Oracle Cloud Computing - Hitting a Cloud Home Run

As cloud computing goes mainstream, the companies that offer software as a service or SaaS; platform as a service, or PaaS; and similar solutions will lead the way. According to Gartner, that's exactly what Oracle is doing. With a full complement of cloud services and solutions, all emphasizing the value of SaaS and similar revenue-generating products, Oracle and IBM are ready to duke it out for No. 2

Should your organisation adopt the Oracle Cloud Computing strategy (known as Oracle on Demand in the e-business community) and move away from locally hosted applications and database solutions?

For existing and especially larger organisations making the journey to Oracle on Demand will be expensive in terms of committing budget and internal IT resources to making the transition to Oracle on Demand. The journey will obviously delay any business projects that would have been managed in the transition time window.

So what compelling events will encourage or force organisations to transition to Oracle on Demand?

·         Upgrade  to R12 and eliminate a significant a number of R11 customisations and avoid the temptation of your organisations to add new customisations

·         Migrate to Fusion – some existing R12 customers (locally hosted) are already using Fusion applications via cloud computing. A number of Peoplesoft HRMS applications are being used by Oracle e-business users ( who have implemented HRMS)

·         Reduce the risks and retention issues around internal Oracle professionals and dependency upon long term contractors

·         Reduce the operational risks and costs of managing data-centres. I came across one Local Council last year who could not afford a disaster recovery solution!

·         Adopt a new IT Strategy - Allow Oracle to manage the Oracle Technology Stack and perform the quarterly patching of the database ( and perhaps even the application)

·         Form a Shared Service Centre with one or more partners and select Oracle to run the IT functions thus allowing the SSC to focus on delivering services to clients.

·         The Organisation is a new Oracle customer – a significant number of new customers (typically small or medium size firms) are adopting Oracle on Demand. Recent implementations I have been involved with include Masternaut and Abtran who also adopted Oracle Accelerators to fast track their implementations and adopt ERP best practice

Can the benefits be realised – what are the potential blockers?

·         Management and IT inertia – keeping IT in-house

·         Organisations retain significant customisations and interfaces making the Oracle Cloud solution potentially more expensive when performing upgrades in the future. Oracle on Demand offers a far more flexible approach these days to managing client environments in the cloud and also those all-important customisations which organisations will continue to develop and upgrade

·         ERP projects continue to focus on ‘installing’ IT at the expense of ‘implementing’ business solutions. Organisations need to invest time and resources into adopting a business change methodology. I have used Changefirst on a several occasions to empower the business community to impact the key ERP process and support the journey to full adoption.

In theory Oracle on Demand should make implementing the IT part of the project easy allowing the project to focus on key workstream like process management, data migration, user testing etc

Adopting Cloud Computing will allow Organisations the opportunity and platform to implement new applications from Oracle and many now are badged under Fusion plus also BI tools and solutions.