New PeopleTools Upgrade Projects

It's a sad day for poor project PPLTLS84CUR. For PeopleTools upgrades they used to be the star of the show, but no longer. Starting in PeopleTools 8.60, PeopleTools upgrades will move to a "delta project" approach. Details of this change can be found in MOS Doc ID 2910205.1.

E-UPG: New PeopleTools 8.60 Upgrade Projects - PPLTLS859 and PPLTLS860 (Doc ID 2910205.1)

This is seemingly a small change, buried within a Change Assistant job, but one I think should be thought about. In the past a PeopleTools upgrade was delivered by project PPLTLS84CUR. This App Designer project included ALL PeopleTools objects, even if they weren't changed by the current upgrade. Going forward we will get a "delta projects", meaning only objects that have changed since the last release.

Why is this important? I feel the main reason is its impact on PeopleTools customizations. While PeopleTools modifications are ideally kept to a minimum, sometimes they are needed. In the past this meant that they needed to be reapplied EVERY PeopleTools upgrade, and sometimes with patching as well. However, going forward you will only have to reapply your PeopleTools modifications IF that object has been changed since the last upgrade. So, if you modify a PeopleTools object that hasn't changed in multiple PeopleTools upgrades, there is a good chance you won't have to reapply the modification during future upgrades as well. In theory this will reduce your mod's "cost of maintenance". Just something to think about when deciding if a PeopleTools customization is worth doing or not...

Something else we need to understand is that customisations in and of themselves are not evil.  If the customisation saves you money, makes money and/or improves quality of customer service then why wouldn’t you do it?  It is this capability that makes PeopleSoft so strong in delivering value to your organisation.  Of course, you do need to do the maths.

[Value Created] + [Quality improved] should be greater than [Cost of build] + [Cost of maintenance]

– Graham Smith