Upgrades and travel

As I noted below we went through with a Tools upgrade to our PeopleSoft Portal a week back. As soon as our North American users got to work on Monday morning performance took a severe hit, logins took in excess of 2-4 minutes if you could get in at all. We’ve been running at capacity for a while while additions to the operating environment are put into place. Load testing in advance of the upgrade showed that we would lose about 10% of our capacity thanks to the larger code base of the newer version of the Tools. I don’t yet have a post-mortem analysis of what went wrong, I’ve heard a few things from my technology team but it’s not a final verdict yet.

With that in play, I’ve started my usability tour. On Wednesday I was in the London where I spent time with HRs for the UK and the technology team that runs our EMEA systems. These went well, and the HRs are quite hungry for self-service although not as delivered by PeopleSoft. To hear their management speak of it there are still data quality challenges and integration issues that keep them from giving a go-ahead. I see where Michael has posed a question about data quality on the discussion forum, certainly for us it’s a topic that arouses passions, although I’m not yet close enough to it to speak in an informed manner.

Dinner and a few pints followed with my tech colleagues, and I had a few hours on Thursday morning to run around and visit some of the classics in London: Big Ben, Covent Garden, Parliament, Picadilly.

That evening I met my colleagues from New York in Dusseldorf. Friday was back-to-back meetings. In the morning through lunch I worked a focus group of German employees on a new Intranet prototype. After a hearty lunch I spent time with one of the senior HR people for Germany and one of his staff. Unlike the UK, they see self-service as a farther goal. The main challenges for them are the number of manual processes they still support and the need to complete a project to iumprove data feeds to and from their payroll vendor. They’re looking to rework their country HR Intranet site, and I hope to work with them to get the content under a management system so we can work towards personalized delivery.

My colleagues and I have stayed the weekend, sightseeing and eating. The food is wonderful but shall we say robust. The weather has been cold and misty, but we’re managing fine.

Tomorrow one of us goes home to NY, and I go to Singapore with the other. I’ll update after that.