by Pat Neary
In this blog I want to cover how you can run more Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (Oracle JDE E1) projects, and why you should aspire to do this.
Run More Oracle JDE E1 Projects
Properly scope and prepare each and every project: If you truly understand the business impact (i.e. the impact on end-users) and the technical impact (i.e. the impact on everything invisible to end-users) you are best placed to plan, execute, and deliver a successful project.
Understanding the impact of a project is not always easy. However, if you use tools to help you understand the impact you can do it. Tools can help you forensically analyze the technical impact of a release upgrade on a customer environment. Tools can also help you see the business impact, and where end-users will experience changes to the system. With these insights you should be able to plan and manage a better project.
Run Better, Faster and Smaller Projects
You can run better, faster and smaller Oracle JDE E1 projects by optimizing your testing. (Software application testing is actually a pretty broad subject area – for the sake of this article I am going to speak only about functional application testing, not full-blown system integration testing, or load testing.)
The job of testing that an application performs the way it should, in support of the business, is actually quite difficult. This testing takes a lot of time and resources (typically between 25% and 35% of a total project budget) and is highly repetitive. But perhaps most importantly, the cost of doing an inadequate job of testing as a project team means the end-users suffer during their acceptance testing, or even worse after you have gone live. We are talking about work and rework, and reputational damage.
If you put a spotlight on testing and make sure you do a really good job of testing, projects will cost less, take less time, and be more readily accepted by end-users. If that acceptance is accompanied by real business benefits everyone is a winner.
Depending on your solution there are a number of tools, but however you tackle the problem, if you genuinely improve the way you test you are positioning yourself for success. You can run more projects if they are well planned, deliver significant end-user benefit, and deliver business benefit without imposing too much strain on the end-user.
If you run more (better, faster, smaller!) projects, in my opinion, a number of good things happen:
- You improve the end-users’ and the business’s perception of Oracle JDE E1. You and your JDE E1 solution starts to look more dynamic and responsive.
- You make it easier to get your end-users and business stakeholders to kick off more projects with you. Each and every project will not be a big scary, hugely impactful event.
- You start the journey to get, and stay, code-current.
- You more regularly and frequently “unlock” the value inherent in JDE E1. You get more from every maintenance dollar you spend because all the good things that Oracle JD Edwards is doing to the product become more accessible.
- You can (if you want to) stop running big capital projects in support Oracle JDE E1. You can treat more of the costs associated with running and maintaining JDE E1 as operating expenses.
We all know that is not as simple as it sounds, and this is where DWS come in. We offer a range of tools to help you analyze, focus and automate testing. To find out how we can help you with this contact us.
