Top 10 JD Edwards Upgrade Project Mistakes
Plan proactively to avoid mistakes.
1.LACK OF SENIOR MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT AND INVOLVEMENT
Commitment and involvement of senior management in the upgrade is key to successfully maintaining focus on the task at hand and acquiring the required resources. Without the commitment and involvement of senior management, the projects seldom accomplish desired outcome.
2.INEFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION AND PLANNING
Trying to execute the upgrade as an ad-hoc set of activities, not as a formal project – often ends in a substandard final outcome. Executing an upgrade without a strategy and plan – leads to false starts and surprises (timeline, costs, quality) down the road.
3.POOR UPFRONT RESEARCH
Insufficient upfront research often leads to unpleasant surprises. These technical and functional surprises frustrate executive management and lead to second guessing the Solution. Project outsiders perceive continued changes to scope caused by poor upfront research as simple scope creep. This often carries a significant negative impact on the project management’s credibility to say nothing of the project timeline and budget.
4.SCOPE DEFINITION
Allowing the scope of an upgrade to include significant new functionality deployment will cause an upgrade project to change into an implementation project.
Articulate what will be performed as part of the project along with the required time, resources and scope. Stakeholders often receive a bad surprise when they assume a certain item is in scope. To combat these assumptions, explicitly communicate with stakeholders what WILL NOT BE included in the project.
5.SCOPE LEAK, SCOPE CREEP AND INEFFECTIVE SCOPE MANAGEMENT
Lack of disciplined scope management allows good ideas to become project show stoppers. The intentions behind these ideas may be very good, but such ideas may increase project risks (timeline, cost, quality and resource).
6.LACK OF FOCUS
Not having adequate organizational focus on the upgrade is a key reason that project timelines slip. In today’s business environment, the number of distractions for the project team are growing.
7.INCOMPLETE TESTING
Lack of proper testing approach and test plans to thoroughly test the new release end-to-end often results in major Go-Live event issues. Nothing frustrates users more than seeing something that used to work stop working after an upgrade is completed.
8.CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION
Trivializing impact of change from the new release on the stakeholders.
Any change is a 'change'. It must be carefully managed and communicated to stakeholders.
9.FORGOTTEN POST UPGRADE PLANNED INITIATIVES
Sub-projects that have been planned after completing upgrade to review and deploy new functionality are sometimes forgotten.
10.NEGLECTING PRIOR LESSONS LEARNED
History does not have to repeat itself. Unfortunately, it often does.