Business Case
Onondoga County had recently gone live with PeopleSoft Financials v9.1 and had a team of technical and functional resources supporting the application and the user base through the transition of bringing live a new system. There was a lot of attention by the team to resolve issues and enhancement requests, due to being live, but there were no standards in place for developing and migrating solutions, nor were there any standards or rules regarding the debugging and resolving of production-based issues.
Through our consulting services, CMA recognized the immediate need to implement development and support standards that would provide guidance to the team and control in a more orderly and auditable manner the migration process and the resolution of production issues.
With no official migration or production support restrictions in place, untested changes were migrated directly to the production environment. Undocumented data changes were made directly via SQL to the data in production. Had there been an audit of process or changes, this lack of policy would have been a major point of omission.
The Solution
First and foremost, the production Oracle ID being used by the technical team was locked down. Only the system administrator retained access to the SQL ID. In its place, read-only Oracle IDs were created to allow the team members read-only access to production data, but not the ability to change data.
Secondly, a policy was drafted that required all normal code changes or enhancements to first be documented in the customer’s Issue Tracking system and then managed through the lifecycle in this system. Workflow was adopted that included documented user system test sign-off and manager approval of all changes before migration to production of the changes was allowed. A migration document was created that specified the steps needed to migrate, and a migration specialist position was created to oversee, manage, and perform all PeopleSoft migrations to production.
An emergency change policy was also created that allowed for the team to make quick changes, but this included a workflow that documented the change and received management approval before the change could be made. SQL changes were vetted by the team before being made to production data.
The most important feature was that we implemented a process that was auditable – that is, that an audit team would be able to review the documentation of a problem or an enhancement request, the solution, the migration tasks, and the user and management approvals received to sign-off on the migration or change.
CMA recognized the need for standards as dictated by best practice, then immediately designed a solution that fit the needs of the customer, and following approval implemented these technical standards to bring order and process to the recently implemented system, following the initial go-live of the PeopleSoft application.
The Results
Onondaga County received a policy and process that provided standards based on best practices that controlled the migration of changes and problem resolution within the PeopleSoft Financials/SCM application. This process created an auditable approval history required when making data or process changes to the production PeopleSoft application. It also helped prioritize and triage system requests.
This project was done within the original allotted budget.
The customer recognized the value provided by CMA and retained our expertise through additional large requirements.