The value of UPK during an upgrade is a hot topic and was a primary focus during our latest customer roundtable featuring The City and County of San Francisco: Leveraging UPK to Accelerate Your PeopleSoft Upgrade. As the Change Management Analyst for their PeopleSoft 9.0 HCM project (Project eMerge), Jan Crosbie-Taylor provided a unique perspective on how they're utilizing UPK and UPK pre-built content early on to successfully manage change for thousands of city and county employees and retirees as they move to this new release.
With the first phase of the project going live next September, it's important to the City and County of San Francisco to 1) ensure that the various constituents are brought along with the project team, and 2) focus on the end user aspects of the implementation, including training. Here are some highlights on how UPK and UPK pre-built content are helping them accomplish this:
As a former documentation manager, Jan really appreciates the power of UPK as a single source content creation tool. It saves them time by streamlining the documentation creation process, enabling them to record content once, then repurpose it multiple times.
With regard to change management, UPK has enabled them to educate the project team and gain critical buy in and support by familiarizing users with the application early on through User Experience Workshops and by promoting UPK at meetings whenever possible. UPK has helped create awareness for the project, making the project real to users.
They are taking advantage of UPK pre-built content to:
Educate the project team and subject matter experts on how PeopleSoft 9.0 works as delivered
Create a guide/storyboard for their own recording
Save time/effort and create consistency by enhancing their recorded content with text and conceptual information from the pre-built content
Create PeopleSoft Help for their development databases by publishing and integrating the UPK pre-built content into the application help menu
Look ahead to the next release of PeopleTools, comparing the differences to help the team evaluate which version to use with their implemtentation When it comes time for training, they will be utilizing UPK in the classroom, eliminating the time and cost of maintaining training databases. Instructors will be able to carry all training content on a thumb drive, allowing them to easily provide consistent training at their many locations, regardless of the environment.
Post go-live, they will deploy the same UPK content to provide just-in-time, in-application support for the entire system via the PeopleSoft Help menu and their PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal. Users will already be comfortable with UPK as a source of help, having been exposed to it during classroom training.
They are also using UPK for a non-Oracle application called JobAps, an online job application solution used by many government organizations. Jan found UPK's object recognition to be excellent, yet it's been incredibly easy for her to change text or a field name if needed.
Please take time to listen to this recording. The City and County of San Francisco's UPK story is very exciting, and Jan shared so many great examples of how they're taking advantage of UPK and UPK pre-built content early on in their project. We hope others will be able to incorporate these into their projects.
Many thanks to Jan for taking the time to share her experiences and creative uses of UPK with us!
- Karen Rihs, Oracle UPK Outbound Product Management
