Read Part 1 :Oracle Financial Cloud Implementation Journey : The ground preparation phase
One of the most crucial learning we had during the second phase was attention to legacy data. Data can derail your project. It can also create anxiety for implementation team and can discourage business users to participate genuinely in further implementation. We all think that we have clean data in our systems and a new system should adopt it quickly. Technically, this is a challenge as Cloud Application has a very different data architecture. You need enough time to study your legacy data, clean it from the new application perspective and design methods to automate data uploads.
We also adopted the agile testing methodology for business users. We went a step ahead and located our module specific implementation team with the users. Both these methods helped us to understand business users better. In a traditional implementation methodology, we would have isolated our implementation team from business users. This would have helped implementation team to focus on their configuration work but wouldn’t have benefited us in the long-term as the team would have been away from the business user’s working domain and data.
Agile testing helped us to generate interest with business users as they could start experiencing benefits of the new system, Once you start answering the question -What is there for me convincingly, you get far better participation from business users.
Our experienced and certified team quickly created small business process zones, configured business workflow, uploaded essential data and presented to business users for testing and approvals. In Oracle Financial Cloud adoption, you need to focus on agile implementation and testing methodologies.
Coming back to data, we created a virtual team of data managers. There was one member from business users side and another from implementation team. This team effectively own the data. They clean and massage data from the business perspective and make it suitable to adopt in the new system. The data managers play an essential role to complete the implementation phase in time and remove all data related hurdles. They participate in agile testing and production movement of data.
During this phase, you also need excellent support from Oracle support team and customer success manager. However, expecting them to understand your unique business processes and provide the best solution immediately is impractical.
Clover Infotech’s implementation team was in continuous touch with Oracle’s customer success manager and was getting timely inputs from product managers on global best practices.
This concludes the adoption phase. The next phase is the stabilization phase, wherein we check performance, compare outputs and focus on enhancing the system to perform to the best of its the ability.
