What do you consider to be your main area of expertise?
Having been a PeopleSoft HCM consultant for over eight years with PeopleSoft Global Services prior to joining Congruent, I've been very fortunate enough to have been able to undertake both functional as well as technical lead roles, so I would consider my areas of expertise to be both my depth of knowledge of the HCM applications and PeopleSoft's Pure Internet Architecture® coupled with my breadth of implementation experience. PeopleSoft is such a huge application, I think that experience acquired over the years is the only real way to get breadth of understanding, something that training alone just can't give you.

What project have you most enjoyed working on and why?
The one that comes to mind would have to be the implementation of PeopleSoft's Global Payroll application at Unilever for a number of reasons. Firstly, the application had just been released so we were truly one of the first to implement it and experience it first hand. Secondly it was built on PeopleSoft's Internet Architecture (PIA), which it would be fair to say was still in it's infancy at the time. Both of these products were (and still are) ground breaking achievements by PeopleSoft. Coupled with the business requirement of moving nearly 40 legacy payrolls onto the PeopleSoft Global Payroll application, the implementation had, to put it mildly, many challenges. This certainly wasn't for the faint hearted, but like with most projects with good business sponsorship and a great all round effort from the project team this one came to a successful conclusion.

One of the most satisfying aspects of this project was to see just how many of the approaches that we had adopted, to standards and control, data migration and environment maintenance where not just carried forward into production support as best practice but also taken up by other Global Payroll implementations.

What would you most like added to the PeopleSoft product?
Two very simple pieces of functionality that would in my mind make the overall experience of the self service user more intuitive. We've all become a custom to buying numerous items over the internet and in almost all cases some form of personal information is requested to complete the order. Simple validation and retrieval of the postal address based on post codes and banking information based on sort codes would in my mind make it a truly internet experience rather than a PeopleSoft one for the average infrequent user.

What is the most frustrating thing about the PeopleSoft product?
Not so much a frustration of the product but a disappointment in just how little of the PeopleSoft HCM application seems to get used post implementation by customers.

What advice would you give to a new client starting with PeopleSoft?
No particular order but just some food for thought:-

• Take the time to talk to other customers who have already been through what you are planning on doing and ask about lessons learnt.
  
• Make sure all that are involved from your organisation understand why YOU have chosen PeopleSoft and the reasons behind the implementation.
  
• Make sure you have a clearly defined and achievable scope and that it is closely linked to your business processes.
  
• Ensure you have strong key stakeholders who are both committed and visible to the cause.
  
• Resist all temptations to sacrifice testing time to make up ground on hitting the go-live date! You will pay for it later without a doubt.
  
• Provide incentives for your own staff that have been seconded to the project team, particularly if the areas from which they have come from are going to be adversely impacted.
  
• And lastly, and probably most important of all, remember to use your own common sense, particular when those around you seem to be loosing theirs!
  
  

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