Implementation Success Best Practices

Contents
Implementation Experience........................................................................................................................2
Governance.................................................................................................................................................3
Project Plan.................................................................................................................................................6
Change Management..................................................................................................................................9
Technology................................................................................................................................................10
Data...........................................................................................................................................................11
Reporting...................................................................................................................................................12
Integration.................................................................................................................................................13
Security......................................................................................................................................................14
ERP Project Best Practices.........................................................................................................................15
HCM Project Best Practices.......................................................................................................................16

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Implementation Experience 

 Implementation Experience - Oracle Cloud Applications, require specific training and

implementation experience.
o Best Practice: Oracle recommends that a customer establish an implementation team
with specific expertise and experience in Oracle’s Cloud Applications. Oracle has found
that, in general, customers who implement cloud solutions without the assistance of an
experienced Partner encounter more challenges and may have less than an optimal
outcome. Therefore, Oracle recommends that, to facilitate a successful outcome, you
engage with an experienced Oracle Cloud Partner.

 Service Requests Tracking and Management - Understanding and embracing Oracle’s Cloud
Support model is a key success metric for any implementation. They are the key communication
vehicle for Cloud implementation issues that require Oracle assistance.
o Best Practice: The project team needs to decide who will log service requests, who will
manage service requests, and who will escalate service requests. Confirmation of
system access to complete these tasks is also required.

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Governance

 Solution Design and Freeze Date – lack of a clearly defined milestone and sign-off event for the
Solution Design. With a solution design being in flux throughout the project, there is risk in
delivering an agreed upon solution on time.
o Best Practice: The solution design and freeze date should be well defined, documented
and included in the project plan. Extending solution design and configuration changes
late in the implementation timeline can result in significant timeline delays. The customer
will need to validate the system is working as designed prior to the freeze date which
again supports the need for the customer to engage in “hands on” testing as early as
possible in the implementation timeline.

 Overall Program Governance - Customer is undertaking a large, multi-deployment program to

execute a transition to the Oracle Cloud. The program has either: multiple deployment waves,
multiple system integration partners, or impacts to multiple business areas.
o Best Practice: embrace a common program-level steering committee approach to
ensure that all of the deployments have an empowered escalation and governance body
to rely on and to help coordinate cross-project dependencies. It is also important to
ensure that all of the key project owners have a voice within the steering committee to
ensure that business commitment is fulfilled and that all required parties are represented.
o Best Practice: In addition to the Steering Committee meeting, Oracle recommends that
a regular cross-functional meeting also be established where each project manager (e.g.
ERP, HCM, Taleo) can provide a status report and also engage in deep detailed
discussions regarding common or cross-functional issues to ensure that everyone is
aware and on the same page. If this cannot be embraced, then it is recommended that
the project managers for each pillar attend the weekly status meetings for each of the
other pillar projects.
o Best Practice: In order to ensure that resources (both customer and partner) that are
shared between the various project plans do not become overloaded that could cause
delays in critical tasks, a special focus needs to be taken to continually monitor these
cross-project linkages and proactive management of any conflicts via manual resource
leveling, continuous, open lines of communication with those shared resources and
overlaying key project tasks for those resources into a single view. This also means that
all project plans cannot have generic resources assigned to tasks, otherwise you cannot
effectively manage these risks.
o Best Practice: All project plans should be resourced with actual people and not generic
placeholder names. This is the only way to properly identify over-loaded resources and
also ensure there is clarity as to who owns each specific task.
o Best Practice: Given the number of resources that are involved from all parties within
this initiative and spelled out within the project plan, Oracle’s recommendation is that
special focus is given to common resources (IT staff, development resources, key cross-
functional business owners) that are shared between the various project plans to ensure
that proper work-leveling and priority task conflict scheduling can be actively done on an
on-going basis. This is required due to the use of multiple project plans for each
deployment and therefore any resource leveling within the tool would only be for that
individual project.
o Best Practice: Instance Management Coordination will also be a key requirement given
that both Oracle Cloud applications are being implemented simultaneously in one phase
with two separate implementation partners. P2T’s, resizing activities, and any other

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 maintenance activities requiring downtime will need to be coordinated between the two
implementation projects.

 Testing Strategy – Testing requirements, approach, metrics, etc. are often left to late in the
project, or just before a key testing cycle (i.e. CRP2, SIT, UAT). This can result in insufficient
preparedness and execution rigor required to fully test the business cycles, processes, or product
functionality for go-live.

o Best Practice: A comprehensive testing approach and strategy, with sufficient details,
cycles, and data coverage, should be started early during project start-up. Depending on
the scope and nature of the implementation, a separate testing track may be warranted.
The testing strategy should include the following:
 Testing of all interfaces and processes that are critical to the daily operations of
the business. Create a pre and post testing (entrance and exit criteria) checklist
for each test cycle.
 Data validation and testing should be incorporated into the test strategy and
plans.
 Simulated End User testing should be included in the test strategy and plan, and
should include transaction volumes encountered during normal business
operations as well as peak periods. Test scripts should include both positive and
negative test scenarios to validate the error checking processes.
o Best Practice: A testing tracker and dashboard should be created and used for all
testing cycles. The test tracker should include a list of all test scripts and whether the test
is completed or not (completion metrics) and whether the test script passed or failed
(pass/fail metrics). The test tracker details should be included in a dashboard and
regularly communicated and discussed during each project status meeting.
o Best Practice: Plan testing events as early as possible in the project schedule. Allow
time for validation, issue resolution, and re-testing events as needed. User adoption and
project success starts with customers being hands onto the system as early and often as
possible in the project lifecycle to validate functionality, to identify process changes and
to provide sufficient time to work through any testing defects.

 Instance Management: The project milestone events and the environments that they occur in
are very important to a project’s success. In order to ensure that project work is properly
planned, coordinated and is executed as planned, we recommend that an instance management
plan is created and maintained so that conflicting activities (i.e. data conversion loads are not
planned during a system maintenance outage) can be avoided. A best practice template is
provided in the Implementation Success Toolkit as a good starting point. The below best practice
notes are things Oracle recommends to be included within the instance management plan.
o Best Practice: Create an instance strategy that defines which environments will be used
for project activities all the way through to production cutover and into the post production
support and stabilization phases. The instance management activities, including plans
for refreshes (e.g. P2T), should be incorporated into the overall project plan and should
be planned out well in advance to meet project timelines.
o Best Practice: Production to Test (P2T) – Recommend allowing time to perform a P2T
before Go-Live to refresh the non-production environment with a copy of production. This
action requires scheduling with a lead time of at least 3 weeks and it is important to
ensure the dates are not during the blackout period.
 Submitting an SR requesting a P2T is required. Refer to My Oracle Support
(MOS) Doc ID 1632261.1 for instructions.

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  Best Practice: Environment Resizing – If your environment requires a resize:
This requires submitting an SR requesting an Environment Resize with at least 4
weeks lead time. Refer to MOS Doc ID 2015718.1 for instructions. A separate
SR should be submitted for each environment to be resized.

o Best Practice: Concurrent Patching – During implementation, consider requesting the

concurrence maintenance option to keep your production and non-production
environments at the same level. For more detail review the MOS Doc ID 1646394.1.
o Best Practice: Monthly Patching – Monthly patching should be requested using the SR
process for the duration of the implementation phase. It is expected that monthly
patches and updates will be required to address issues identified during the
implementation phase. The project plan should incorporate the monthly patch
maintenance schedule. After the implementation phase is complete Oracle recommends
moving back to scheduled Quarterly patching.
o Best Practice: Oracle Fusion Applications Update Policy – The Oracle Applications
Cloud Service periodically provides standard software and hardware updates. These
updates are applied automatically to your environments on a pre-defined schedule. For
full update policy details, see MOS Doc ID 1966109.1.

 Appropriate Expectation setting, communication, and quality deliverables are required for
a successful implementation.
o Best Practice: Projects should have defined and appropriate governance, clear
communication plans, phase checkpoint reviews and signoffs, and risk/issue reviews.
o Best Practice: A formal PMO status meeting should be held weekly with documented
status reports indicating the overall project status (red, yellow or green), status of task
completion; upcoming scheduled work, identified risk and issues and next steps for
resolution.
o Best Practice: A Steering Committee should be established and meet on a monthly
basis, at a minimum. The Steering Committee should have Executive and Project
Sponsor representation from the Customer and Partner.
o Best Practice: Formal sign-off of major deliverables should be required. An agreed
upon time limit for review and approval should be established (usually 3-5 days).

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Project Plan

 Scope and Project Schedule – a comprehensive Project Plan with all required milestones, and
proper amount of time to complete all tasks is a key to success.
o Best Practice: When a project is being implemented on a tight timeline it is imperative
that an achievable scope be agreed upon up front and maintained throughout the project
duration. Any incremental scope additions or changes will adversely affect the project
timeline.
o Best Practice: Oracle recommends a minimum of CRP1, CRP2 and User Acceptance
Test (UAT) testing cycles within any project phase implementation. If a significant
number of integrations are also in scope an additional test cycle for system integration
testing (SIT) is recommended.
o Best Practice: Start testing as early as possible and spread the testing cycles out to
provide sufficient time between testing cycles to allow for problem resolution.
o Best Practice: Add a “Complete and Sign -off” line item on the Project Plan when all
testing cycles (CRP 1, CRP 2, SIT and UAT) are complete to ensure customer is in
agreement that these are complete.
o Best Practice: Oracle Cloud mandatory updates occur on a monthly or quarterly
cadence. It is important to build time into the project plan to accommodate the cloud
update events including adequate testing time. This discipline will continue once you are
live in Production as well.
For ERP Only
o Best Practice SIT and UAT testing cycles should include the testing of a month-end
close.
For Payroll Only
o Best Practice Oracle recommends a minimum of two parallel test cycles with two
separate data sets (the more test cycles the better). Time needs to be allocated to
resolve any issues between these cycles.

 Project Documentation Misalignment – the Project Plan should include all scope identified and
agreed to in the Project Charter. Changes to the scope should be documented in a Project
Change Request.
o Best Practice: All documentation produced for an implementation should tell a complete
and comprehensive story. Whatever is included in a project’s scope should have tasks in
the project plan to address the work to implement what is in scope.
o Best Practice: If scope for any given project changes, all documentation should be
updated (scope, project plan, resource plan) to address the change in scope and to
ensure the plan is in alignment to address the new scope.

 Resource Constraints – Customer resource constraints can pose a risk to a project if the project
is not properly planned to accommodate resource availability. Possible risks include approval of
new processes, time to test, time to clean data, time to complete training for proper adoption of
system, and sign-off on deliverables. Other competing priorities should also be taken into
account (e.g. current business burden, other priority projects).

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 o Best Practice: Customer and Partner should develop a realistic, resourced project plan
that has the sign-off of both parties.
o Best Practice: Customer and Partner should align resources prior to the start of the
project and work to provide scheduled time for knowledge transfer.
o Best Practice: Ownership and understanding of the system being built for the customer
is critical to any implementation.

 Rapid Implementation Deployment - Rapid implementations are a very cost effective way to
deploy a Cloud solution quickly to users. In order to ensure the cost effective approach aligns
with effective delivery, containment of scope must be considered.
o Best Practice: Rapid Implementation deployments should focus on delivering out of box
functionality only. Customization of the application or a large number of or complex
integrations should not be included as that would not allow adherence to a rapid
deployment.
o Best Practice: Availability of resources for testing and training activities is key to ensure
tasks within an aggressive timeline are not negatively impacted.
o Best Practice: Any recommended changes, customizations or reporting that come out
of testing should be noted and addressed as a future phase. Business processes should
be adapted to the out of box capabilities of the product for initial launch.
o Best Practice: Messaging to the users around the strategy in using a rapid
implementation deployment is key such that the users understand how the product will be
deployed and how changes to the product will be accommodated in a future phase.

 Post Go-Live Support and Sustainment - After going live with your Cloud Applications it is
important to ensure that you have an adequate post go-live support plan to support the
organization through the first major milestone, typically a month end close cycle, and is prepared
to sustain the applications on a go forward basis.  The sustainment activities typically include
providing a level 1 helpdesk to support the users on the business processes and functionality that
is supported by the cloud applications implemented and, in the event of system issues, is
prepared to log an SR and work with Oracle Support on the issue’s resolution process.
o Best Practice: Set up a level 1 helpdesk that includes business and IT analyst(s) that
can provide support to the users. The selected business and IT analyst(s) should receive
Oracle training on the Cloud applications implemented and should obtain knowledge
transfer from the System Implementation Partner on the system design and configuration
options implemented.
o Best Practice: Knowledge Transfer Document / Checklist – A knowledge transfer
checklist should be developed and reviewed with the Customer and their knowledge
should be validated before the System Implementation Partner disengages.  Key is to
focus on daily activities and configuration setups. There should be a formal lessons
learned after every test cycle so that the knowledge transfer occurs during the
implementation.
For ERP Only
o Best Practice: A post go-live support plan should be in place to provide adequate
support and assistance from the System Implementation Partner through the first month
end close.

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  Quarterly Updates – Quarterly updates will be delivered on a regular assigned cadence
throughout the duration of the project and into steady state.
o Best Practice: the project plan should reflect time of at least two weeks per quarter to
test the features automatically delivered as part of the release.
o Best Practice: The Release Notes found at https://cloud.oracle.com/readiness for each
quarterly update should be examined for the impact to the current application functionality
and appropriate test plans should be established and executed.
o Best Practice: Features and functions that require a customer to “opt-in” should first be
enabled and tested in a stage environment that is no being used for critical testing
activities. Once the new functionality has been fully tested and vetted, it should be
enabled in the additional stage environments.

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Change Management

 Training Approach, Change Management and System Adoption – A well-defined Training,

Change Management, and System Adoption Strategy should be developed for the project.
There is often the incorrect expectation that the exact same functionality that exists in legacy
systems also exists in Oracle Cloud applications. Lack of a defined plan and approach for Cloud
Training and System Adoption is very important and should be incorporated early in the project.
o Best Practice: Customer key project team members should attend application training on
all products being implemented. Instructor led training is often more effective than self-
training.
o Best Practice: Change management plans should be developed and incorporated as
tasks in the project plan to maintain the focus on these key activities.
o Best Practice: Fit your business processes to the system, not the other way around.
o Best Practice: Knowledge Transfer Document / Checklist – A knowledge transfer
checklist should be developed and reviewed with the Customer and their knowledge
should be validated before the System Implementation Partner disengages.  A key
success factor is to focus on daily activities and configuration setups.

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Technology

 Configuration in Production – Configuration in Production prior to full testing in Non-Production

environments is not a best practice.
o Best Practice: Configuration in a test environment should be completed for all test
activities prior to doing any configuration in the production environment. The production
environment configuration should only be commenced when the final design and testing
has been signed off and typically would not occur until the production cutover activities
commence. In the event that testing uncovers changes to the configuration that is
foundational in nature (i.e. <put in an example such as Chart of accounts design for
ERP>) a P2T can occur as a fresh start to your test environment for configuration
purposes.

 IP White Listing - IP White Lists requires work being done with Oracle Support and Cloud
Operation. This should be scheduled early and planned for in the project plan.
o Best Practice: This action requires scheduling and a lead time of at least 2 weeks.
o Best Practice: Submitting an SR for IP White Listing is required. Refer to Doc ID
2089639.1 for more information.
If deploying PBCS only
o Best Practice: Please refer to Doc ID 2132589.1 on how to use Self Service to configure
IP Whitelisting for PBCS.

 SSO Enablement - SSO Enablement requires work being done with Oracle Support. This should
be scheduled early and planned for in the project.
o Best Practice: The entire processing of setting up SSO should be expected to take two
weeks or more. Plan this time into your project accordingly.
o Best Practice: Submitting an SR for SSO Enablement on each of your environments is
required. Refer to Doc ID 1484345.1 for more information.
For Taleo Only
o Best Practice: Submitting an SR for SSO Enablement of Taleo is required. Refer to Doc
ID 1519874.1 for more information.

 Certified version of browsers - Always use the latest certified version of browsers.
o Best Practice: Only certified browser versions should be utilized. Refer to Doc ID
1385107.1 for more information.

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Data

 Data Conversion – Carefully review data conversion requirements. There may be options that
will not require many years of data to be converted to Oracle Cloud applications.
o Best Practice: A conversion strategy workshop is usually included early in the program
to review the customer’s needs by data category (i.e., financial data, employee data).
The workshop also explores alternate methods to address data requirements.
Approaches to cleaning and transforming data must be discussed since the data is not
clean and may not be usable in its present format.
o Best Practice: Conversion of all data should not be a pre-requisite to go live in either
implementation phase. Data conversion to cover “go forward” needs should be the
primary objective.
o Best Practice: Data conversion tasks should begin early. These tasks often require
more time than originally expected.
o Best Practice: The project plan should include a minimum of 2 test data conversion
iterations prior to the data conversions in production for go live.
o Best Practice: Where possible, any closed data transactions should be considered for
retention in any legacy system and accessed there in a read only fashion so as to
minimize the amount of data being brought into the Oracle’s cloud application. If this is
not possible, a data archiving strategy should be considered so that as the data in the
Oracle cloud application continues to grow, there is a plan to archive off older data that is
no longer accessed regularly.
For ERP Only
o Best Practice: Use the guidelines provided in the new support article to verify data
conversion results. Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud Service: How to
Verify Data Conversion Results (Doc ID 2084189.1)

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Reporting

 Reporting - Reporting requirements are often left to the end of the project to be defined and
tested resulting in reports not always being available or ready for go-live. It is important to ensure
that both custom and standard reports are tested early in the implementation to validate that the
reports will meet all reporting needs. Scope changes to incorporate custom reports late in the
implementation can significantly impact the project timeline.
o Best Practice: Define reporting requirements and test the standard and custom reports
early in the project.
o Best Practice: Critical go-live reports should be defined as a higher priority with
development and testing completed as early as possible.
o Best Practice: Leverage the standard out of the box reports instead of recreating
existing reports.
o Best Practice: In the event custom reports are required, there should be time built into
the project plan for performance testing of custom reports. Inefficient reports can impact
cloud performance.

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Integration

 System integration / External Integrations – Prepare for integrations by considering the needs
of all applications that will interface with Oracle Cloud applications. Resources from the Customer
and System Implementation Partner will need to be aligned to allow for joint development and
testing.
o Best Practice: Integrations between Oracle Cloud and other systems can be complex.
Integration development should be started as early as possible to allow time to complete
the work and resolve testing issues, without jeopardizing the project timeline
o Best Practice: The integration approach and technology needs to be established during
project startup to ensure that any additional service subscription or technology licensing
is completed early and that proper technical resources can be assigned to the project.
o Best Practice: At least two test cycles should include integration testing between the
Oracle Cloud and Oracle system(s) and/or non-Oracle system(s).
o Best Practice: Involve 3rd parties in the earliest stages of the project when integrations
and testing are required.
 3rd parties tend to work on their own timelines and will require early and often
communication to meet project milestones.
 The schedules of the System Implementation Partner, the Customer and 3rd
Party resources for these non-Oracle applications will need to be coordinated to
allow for joint development and testing.

 Oracle Cloud Multi-environment Solutions – When a deployment includes SCM and Logistics
Cloud, the project will have multiple environments per project stage (i.e. two production
environments, two test environments). There will be integration requirements in order for data to
flow between the two environments that need to be considered. The best practice integration
approach differs based upon the cloud product mix and the customer requirements.
o Best Practice: Oracle provides pre-built adapters and integration guidance if Oracle
Integration Cloud Service is being used as the integration technology. More information
can be found on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

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Security

 Overall Security Model for GSI Multi-Pillar Deployment – Multiple application pillar
implementations within a single GSI environment, require special cross-project coordination to be
maintained in putting together a working Cloud application security model.
 Best Practice: Always try to attempt to leverage the seeded application roles instead of
creating any custom roles. Custom security roles will increase the amount of research
and testing required as part of an upgrade to determine what impacts the upgrade has to
those custom roles.
 Best Practice: Try to find the “right-sized” role for the requirement. Oracle Cloud
applications typically come with seeded application roles to support a three-tiered
hierarchy (think super-user, manager, and clerk) where each role adds more access as
you ascend the hierarchy. Assigning both the clerk and manager to a single user is not
best practice as all the access in clerk is also present in manager. This leads to a
bloated security profile for a user and can have adverse impacts.

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ERP Project Best Practices

 Configuration Validation Best Practice: It is a best practice to execute the Enterprise

Structures Setup Report before conducting the CRP to validate configuration setup. The Oracle
ERP Cloud Guided Path and Configuration Best Practices highlights key Oracle resources/best
practices in the context of the Oracle Cloud Services Lifecycle. The majority of resources will
require access to My Oracle Support (MOS). The Guided Path can be used as a checklist to
ensure that the project team is leveraging available resources effectively. There are several
resources specifically defined for troubleshooting and configuration validation.

 Check Printing – Check Printing requires time for set up, testing and work being done with
Oracle Support for security. This should be scheduled early and planned for in the project.
o Best Practice: There are a few documents to support the setup of Check printing.
Please refer to the following documentation and allow enough time in the plan for proper
set up and testing. The documents to reference are Setup Instructions for Printing
from Oracle Cloud (Doc ID 1964157.1) and Troubleshooting Guide for Cloud Printer
(Doc ID 2140116.1).
o Best Practice: Because the checks being printed will require the customer bank
validation approval, it is highly recommended that the customer contacts the bank early
on to get a resource engaged and a plan mapped out for validation. This validation
process typically takes longer than expected.

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HCM Project Best Practices

 Check Printing – Check Printing requires time for set up, testing and work being done with
Oracle Support for security. This should be scheduled early and planned for in the project.
o Best Practice: There are a few documents to support the setup of Check printing.
Please refer to the following documentation and allow enough time in the plan for proper
set up and testing. The documents to reference are Setup Instructions for Printing
from Oracle Cloud (Doc ID 1964157.1) and Troubleshooting Guide for Cloud Printer
(Doc ID 2140116.1).
o Best Practice: Because the checks being printed will require the customer bank
validation approval, it is highly recommended that the customer contacts the bank early
on to get a resource engaged and a plan mapped out for validation. This validation
process typically takes longer than expected.

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