A PeopleSoft upgrade is no minor feat. There is a lot of planning and decision making that must go into the upgrade process. Does my current hardware meet the minimum requirements? Do I need to upgrade my O/S? How about my Database Software? Also, there are many other factors to consider like what people will be involved? What testing strategy will be used? What kind of training is needed and how many people need to go? The bottom line is that planning is the essential Key to a successful upgrade. This article is one of many in this series of "Upgrading like a PeopleSoft Pro" articles and discusses several planning tasks that are necessary for a successful upgrade.

Be sure you have an adequate plan and task outline completed before you start your upgrade project. These plans and task outlines will help you in assessing your business requirements, technical requirements, implementation/upgrade team requirements, and in defining other project considerations. From a high level, here are the major planning activities that need to be performed.

1. Acquire all pertinent upgrade information and materials
2. Training for your team
3. Determining Business Requirements
4. Producing a Fit Gap Analysis
5. Layout your technical requirements
6. Define the upgrade plan
7. Define and layout your testing Strategy
8. Make sure you fully understand the process

This first series of these articles addresses item number one, dealing with the acquisition of pertinent upgrade information and materials.

Once your organization had made the decision to upgrade to PeopleSoft 8, you will need to choose your upgrade path. This can easily be done by comparing your current version of the application with the certified upgrade paths defined by PeopleSoft. Depending on how old your release is, you may find that you need to make your upgrade a multi-version upgrade. With this out of the way you are ready to obtain the necessary information.

The very first step to successful information gathering is a visit to Oracle Meta-link’s PeopleSoft Upgrade Section. This section will supply all of the necessary information and notices for each release. This is also where you will find the certified upgrade path for your release.

Next you will download the upgrade documentation for your upgrade path. This document will contain all of the necessary steps for performing your upgrade. You will need to review this document to find specific instructions for planning your upgrade.

Updates & Fixes seem to be another crucial step. Pay particular attention to any upgrades and fixes that are labeled as "Required for Install", or "Required for Upgrade." Skipping one of these required updates or fixes could result in an upgrade disaster.

PeopleSoft upgrade’s use the Change Assistant application to organize and automate the upgrade tasks. This application is template driven containing the pertinent steps for your upgrade process and ensuring that you run them in the specific order as instructed by PeopleSoft. These templates execute set scripts and application engine programs that will be used to convert your data. Download the latest release of the Change Assistant and the associated scripts and programs. Be sure to also download the UPGCONVERT project that will be later loaded into your PeopleSoft Application Designer

Now that you have downloaded and reviewed the pertinent information and materials for your upgrade, be sure to review them, and then review them, and then review them again. If you think I just repeated myself I did, for a very good reason. Project managers, and technical team leads must know the upgrade process before starting it. In addition to this information, it is an excellent idea to download and study all PeopleSoft whitepapers on the new features of the version you are upgrading to.

Now that you understand that the first step in this upgrade process is to make sure that you are well educated. The next step will be to ensure the proper education and training of your Upgrade team. This will include the education of the Upgrade process and the required training to help your team be successful in upgrading.