Duke Energy did a great session this morning at OpenWorld about how they handle PeopleSoft maintenance and upgrades. After Scott Shafer of Oracle kicked off the session with some introductions and background info, Keith Jenkins and Richard Donaldson of Duke Energy took over and described how they "won the battle" with dealing with maintenance and upgrades.

They started by describing how things had gotten a bit out of hand with falling behind on maintenance. Falling behind on maintenance was not really a planned strategy, just something that the organization sort of fell into. The longer being off maintenance, the harder to get back on maintenance, which (among other things) led to a lot customizations. On the order of multiple thousands of customizations.

This got bad enough that they went for a period of about 4 years without taking any new PeopleSoft functionality at all and began having a harder time dealing with things like OS level upgrades because they so were far enough behind with PeopleSoft.

Part of the problem with an environment that is slowly eroding is that there isn't any one incident that causes change. However, they were having financial closes take 11 ("grueling") days, cases where it wasn't obvious what the source of the truth was, and other SOX related issues. The net is that they did finally come to the realization that, as an organization, they could still meet their business requirements even with doing more advance planning and process management of their PeopleSoft environment.

The major project in this transformation was their upgrade from Financials 8.0 to Financials 8.9. This upgrade not only involved financial process re-engineering, but a switch from running PeopleSoft on DB2 on the mainframe to running on Oracle on AIX.

A Financial Program Office was created as well. One of the outputs from the Financials Program Office is a roadmap of where they are headed as an organization (related to Financials), and how that translates down to application projects. They made sure to include things like applying PeopleTools maintenance as specific items on the roadmap, recognizing that infrastructure investments are part of the overall health of the application. This has now been successfully in place through other upgrades and maintenance (although nothing else the scope of the 8.0 to 8.9 upgrade).

They had a number of practical tips and techniques, such as involving their production support teams earlier on in projects, so that the transitions are smoother when new functionality goes live.

They did a good job of taking questions from the audience during the session as well. After the first few people stood up and asked questions in the middle of the session, I had my doubts that they would be able to finish in time, but it actually worked out fairly well.

Labels: 2009, OpenWorld, Upgrade