How to prepare for Continuous Delivery - Part Three of Four

In parts one and two of our Continuous Delivery blog series, we discussed the “what” and the “why” behind Continuous Delivery. Now we’ll focus on how to prepare your organization for Continuous Delivery.

Adopting a Continuous Delivery mindset

As we’ve discussed in our previous articles, adopting Continuous Delivery will provide significant, strategic benefit to your business. It also means the heavy lifting of major updates are a thing of the past. But, it will require some adaptation in the ways you keep your EnterpriseOne system up to date.At a high level, you’ll want to begin by allocating resources in two key areas:

• Monitoring upcoming updates and understanding their impact
• Evaluating and applying regular changes through ESUs (Electronic Software Updates)

So how will you achieve this? Because every business is different, you’ll want to put some advance efforts into creating an adoption strategy that fits your organization. Fortunately, it’s not rocket science, and a little planning and preparation will go a long way.By making some decisions at the corporate level, adjusting roles and responsibilities for your business analysts, and leveraging existing resources, you’ll be well on your way to a smooth adoption.

Preparing for Continuous Delivery at the corporate level

First off, you’ll want to spend some time hashing out the expectations and rules for keeping your JD Edwards application code current. If you are currently engaged with a service provider, consult with them and ask how they can help. Understanding internal business implications is also important. What other initiatives are planned? When are the month/quarter/year end cycles – and what is the impact?You’ll also want to consider global ownership and who ultimately owns the responsibility. Will this be your application manager or another role? This will need to be managed as a project, so clarifying who is best suited to play that role is important.Finally, put some structure around the initiative by scheduling regular team meetings in advance and creating an update schedule to monitor progress. Having these items in place will help ensure you start off on the right foot.

Adjusting roles and responsibilities

Once you’ve settled the questions of ownership and responsibility, your people will also need to gear up for a few different responsibilities with Continuous Delivery. For example, the responsibility for assessing ESUs and creating update plans may now fall to your Business Analysts and Functional JDE Module Owners.Business Analysts will also need to be scanning for new ESUs and downloading them regularly, as well as assessing their impact. JDE tools such as Change Assistant or Object Usage Tracking (a new feature in 9.2) will help in assessing the impact on your system. Object Usage Tracking will also help in determining the objects to be validated prior to applying ESUs, so be sure your people understand how to take advantage of this tool.

Business resources to leverage

In preparation for Continuous Delivery, you’ll want to leverage your existing business process documentation. It will help you understand what and how to test, and what business processes may be impacted by the changes.A repeatable testing plan that leverages pre-defined testing scripts will also come in handy, as would an investment in an automated scripting tool to speed up testing and help minimize errors. These functional testing scripts will need to be kept current by your business analysts or Module Owners.We hope this helps give you an idea of how to prepare for Continuous Delivery. As always, we’re here to answer any questions you have – email us or call 1.888.308.ERP1 for a no-pressure, objective consultation from our experts.Next up – watch for a five-step example execution strategy for Continuous Delivery developed by our experts.

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Did you miss the previous articles in this series? Read What is Continuous Delivery? or Why adopt Continuous Delivery now.