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F E A T U R E

Triage, IT Style

November 1, 2002
By James Hutchinson

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No Shining Examples

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Getting Ready for the Big Date
	No Shining Examples
	A Whole New World
	Children's IT Makes Friends on the Floors
	20/20 Hindsight
	Next Steps

The app dev team had its own set of challenges. As far as Children's could determine, this project was the largest and most complex ERP rollout any medical facility had ever undertaken. During the planning phases, Children's could not find another hospital that had replaced all its core business applications simultaneously, making it difficult to predict the true scope of the project. And to add to the uncertainty, Children's was using PeopleSoft's first Web-based client release. Predictably, the implementation was buggy.

"Patches were coming out almost weekly," says Cohen. "We could not stop development to upgrade." In lieu of patches, they were forced to create workarounds. They performed patch management by hand, developer by developer. With so many application modules going live at the same time, tracking patches was difficult. (If you find yourself in patching hell, see "PatchLink Helps Keep Windows Closed.")

When Children's froze the code for the new application pre-launch, it fell so far behind in applying patches and bug fixes that PeopleSoft threatened to stop supporting the code. Ultimately, though, "the teams and personalities worked well [together]," Cohen says, and the code was stabilized in time for the April go-live date.

Fat Pipes, Will Travel

A problem that has plagued many an ERP implementation is insufficient network resources. Those "fat client" architectures of old never lent themselves to running across WAN links and to underpowered PCs and workstations. However, because Children's was using PeopleSoft's first Web-based client architecture, there was no need for a major network overhaul.

That was just fine with Network Manager Hourigan, who was already busy with a hospitalwide infrastructure upgrade that would support not just the PeopleSoft project but business initiatives yet to come.

At the time, the hospital's existing network backbone was a mesh of the now defunct Digital GIGAswitches running on 100-Mbps FDDI links. Hourigan and his team were building a new network core based on Cisco Catalyst 6000 Ethernet switches linking at 4 gigabits per second--40 times the capacity of the old network. When Hourigan was approached to monitor load testing of the ERP application, he understandably concluded that "bandwidth is not the issue." In fact, the SolarWinds.Net SolarWinds application used to monitor traffic between clients, Web servers and database servers barely registered the testing.

However, Hourigan needed to verify that the PeopleSoft application would work across its modem dialup, VPN and WAN infrastructures. Web-based or not, there were still concerns that the application might fail outside the hospital LAN. Testing showed that the application ran well within the usability requirements in all areas, albeit with a small performance degradation at remote offices. As the hospital expands the PeopleSoft application to 7,000-plus employees, Hourigan expects to see the network load grow but is confident the Cisco architecture will meet the demand.

The Big Day

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.