What happens after you golive with a Cloud implementation ?
This is what smart directors and VPs would like to know and here is my experience.
- Golive day : Barely anything happens on the day of golive unless you have to turn back the switch and continue with the legacy system for some catastrophic event. I havent seen this happen yet but have heard about it. Sanity testing is conducted by the implementing partner, careful kudos and contained party perhaps at the Director’s room.
- Day 1 – Day 30 : Focus is on user adoption. In a good scenario, the user adoption steadily increases . Depending on when in the calendar year / employee lifecycle the golive was, modules will be used and popular. Self services will be tried out first such as payroll slips and personal, beneficiary information. First payroll run, first planning & budgeting cycle, first closing of books in the first 30 days. First transactional reports are run. First issues are reported – typically end to end transactions and transaction reports are the first to experience snags if any. This is because, typically end to end integrated testing is harder to conduct thoroughly while the easier unit testing is performed to perfection. End to end testing is also harder because there could be upstream and downstream systems that need to be setup , which may need to provide input data or output data …anyways all those factor in after golive.
- Day30 – Month 6 : Implementation partner leaves at the end of the typical 30 day hypercare support period. Organizations which did not have good change management , knowledge transfer, training , inadequate support personnel and preparedness will typically begin to struggle at this point. The list of issues will be the most watched KPI. Detailed Documentation of the new processes and decisions taken cannot be found easily but since most primary project members are still available operations are not affected. Intricacies of the cloud system beyond what was tested come to light to those running operations. Failed User logins, New hire provisioning, manager / personnel transfer, missed notifications, retro processes, logging service requests/ updating and closing tickets are the typical problem areas. Often I see helpdesks being split post golive which complicates resolution processes and time taken to resolve. Yes, these all were being done using the legacy system too but now it feels like being in a new house and not knowing always how to do what. Depending on how elaborate the IT support/ Functional support and Oracle support is , it can take a long time to get resolutions to even seemingly simple issues. ‘It used to be so easy in the legacy system’ will be a oft heard phrase. Operational teams get used to the quarterly ( or whatever period ) patch-test-fix cycle. Year end process , month end processes have their first rounds.
- Month 6 + :
Decisions taken earlier in the project are often questioned and truth be told it maybe wiser to change some of them and adapt. If a managed services team was not already in place the directors may begin to ponder about hiring one. Documentation, or lack of it, is truly tested. As new support personnel join the operations, knowledge of the systems become personal instead of institutional. With dozens if not hundreds of small changes being made every month, the backlog becomes an noted KPI. But they also lead to documentation , help systems , knowledge bases, technical documentation becoming slowly outdated. Those who have been in the organization for long become real assets for operations to be successful. If reports become an issue, new BI and reporting tools are sought after. Since testing is now part of the job automated testing tools are considered. Stabilization can be spotted often in operations though some areas remain known dangers. Unknown dangers become more and more spotty.
- Year 1: Processes stabilize, operations stabilize for the most part. Finally leaders can move focus from transactional issues to strategic issues. Data stabilizes. Focus can move to predictive processes from descriptive/ transactional ones.
– By HRG. Contact DoingERP for further Consulting work on Enterprise Cloud Transformations.