Program Manager Memo — Summer 2011 by Mike Herrin, ABT Program Manager Six Months to Go – No Option to Extend the Schedule!
King County’s Accountable Business Transformation Program (ABT Program) is on schedule. We will implement the Oracle financial system and PeopleSoft payroll/time & labor system in early January 2012 and the Hyperion budget system in February 2012. Both the Finance Project and the Payroll/Time & Labor (PTL) Project are in the testing phases. The Finance Project is now deep into end user testing and side system testing while the PTL project has entered the important parallel testing phase. Meanwhile the Budget Project is in the final stages of the build phase and will enter the testing phase in August 2011.
The next six months will be intense. The primary activities will be testing, change management, training, and finally the cutover to the new systems. Our training teams are busy building training classes and materials. We are involving hundreds of users in a variety of testing activities and conducting numerous change management activities to ensure that the agencies and users understand the concepts of the new system. We have also implemented an agency readiness review to check the progress of each agency regarding specific activities they must complete prior to implementation. Formal classroom training starts in October of this year and we expect to train nearly 2,000 users.
One of the major changes introduced by the ABT Program is the implementation of a single PeopleSoft-based payroll system. Nearly all agencies will be on a biweekly pay cycle. We are now communicating the details of this change to all county employees to make sure they are prepared for new paychecks and a different pay cycle.
Between now and the end of the year, we will need to fix problems found during testing, train 2,000 users, plan the complicated cutover and finally implement the new systems. During the first few months of 2012 the ABT Program Team and the newly formed Business Resource Center (BRC) will support the new systems. There will likely be numerous stabilization issues to manage during that time period.
The implementation of enterprise systems is an extremely difficult undertaking for a large and complicated organization like King County that has many different lines of business, many unions and numerous funding sources. The ABT Program teams and the County agencies have been have been working tirelessly to stay on schedule. The support at King County for the ABT Program is excellent. King County Executive Dow Constantine has made it clear that the ABT Program is a high priority within the County and implementation in January 2012 is critical. It is clear that we will implement both the Oracle financial system and the PeopleSoft payroll/time & labor system in early January 2012 with the Hyperion budget system about one month later. There is no option to extend the schedule.
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