Come go-live time, the Children's PeopleSoft implementation team focused on all the standard user items: application training and frontline support for trouble calls. What it missed, Murray says, was a golden opportunity to minimize user confusion about why people were being made to move to a new way of doing business. "Training is an opportunity to disseminate information about the direction of the hospital," Murray says, and to answer questions like "Why are we doing this project?" Training "is more than just mouse clicks and screen shots."
When we asked Murray if he'd ever been informed of the business initiatives that made the PeopleSoft project so critical, he said he had a pretty good idea, but added that most people were forming impressions on their own. He says executive management's understanding of the project goals never made its way down to the masses.
Clear from the start, however, was that the days of buying best-of-breed applications and customizing them beyond recognition were gone, CTO Ogawa says.
It was decided at the outset that the initial rollout of PeopleSoft 8 would maintain its out-of-the-box look and feel. That decision helped the hospital meet its go-live date but created some user backlash.
"We could make it pretty, or we could stick to our philosophy ... how it comes out of the box is how we're going to put it in," says Ogawa. "Maybe its not intuitive, maybe its cumbersome, but you're running the business."
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