The best way to save money on your upgrade is to do things right the first time. Being wrong is expensive.

There I was all by myself sitting at a long table (..on deck as it were..) being asked detailed questions about how I planned to manage a complex PeopleSoft upgrade project. In those days it was not unusual for me to be in a position like this. I had already spent more than a decade running complicated implementation and upgrade projects. What was unusual was the timing. This session was occurring before the contract was awarded; before I or anyone else from my consulting firm had been officially assigned. Later I discovered that this client had scheduled, immediately preceding the selection of a vendor, similar sessions with each of the finalists. They felt a strong need to assess before they made the final decision the individuals who were going to be assigned to their project and whether those individuals had sufficient skillsets to get the job done. Read more »

The best way to save money on your project is to do things right the first time. Being wrong is expensive. In this posting and in the series to follow I will recommend ways to save money on your upgrade and improve your chances of success at the same time.

Raoul (an internal employee and not his real name) was fixing something, yet again, that an outside technical consultant had done wrong. Raoul had other PeopleSoft technical responsibilities but the upgrade was the department’s highest priority project and, by the way, the project was on a very tight schedule. I remember asking Raoul why he was not doing the work that the outside consultant was doing. His answer; Nobody ever asked me about what I could do.

In this age of outsourcing, exclusive vendor contracting, and rampant delegation to organizational outsiders the true cost of getting things done too often gets lost. If a person in your household can cut the grass or paint a wall then paying an outsider to do those jobs is a waste of money. If people inside your organization can make the Integration Broker (IB) run smoothly, setup Recruiting Solutions, or create XML Publisher reports then paying outside entities to do these jobs can cost your organization considerable money.

My second recommendation for saving money: Carefully assess what your internal people can do. Read more »