This is truly exciting.

For the first in EVO IT’s history we have developed and launched our first 100% homemade product – PeopleSoft Progressive Rollout. This is a significant step in our company’s business growth and expansion as it marks our transition from a services only provider to a Services and Products double-play offering.

Around here we call it PPR for short, cause everyone here gets a nickname.

I won’t share too many details on the actual product as I would like to encourage you visit the product page and read more about it. But rather I thought I would share with you the process of how PPR (PeopleSoft Progressive Rollout) came to be and main design decisions that were considered when developing the solution.

PPR started with a dream, and to be honest, it wasn’t ours. A large PeopleSoft customer approached and provided us with following conundrum: “Why is it, that whenever we introduce an enhancement, fix or change in our PeopleSoft systems, every single user needs to come in the morning and meet that change? Even our legacy mainframe systems allow to introduce a change to a specific group of users first and then gradually rollout that change to the entire organization”.

Here at EVO, a customer’s frustration in our “go-to-action” call. We sat around our conference room table (trusty whiteboard close by) and started to conceptualize how to meet this challenge. Fast forward a few weeks, quite a few food deliveries, way too may Nespresso capsules and several extremely late-night “workshops” – we got it.

From the initial POC which was developed on our (then only!) development server we were now tasked with packaging this innovative technology as a product that we can market, sell and support. There were several design principles put forward as a starting point for this project:

• Being a product, PPR should work straight out-of-the-box, no customizations required and platform/version dependence.
• A product which reduces disruption should not be disruptive of its own, which means: ease of installation, configuration and use.
• Should not produce additional training or overhead on the different populations of users using PeopleSoft.
• Maintain the flexibility provided by the PeopleTools development toolset platform – make the product customizable per customer’s specific needs and requirements.

And so a new (and first!) product was born into the EVO IT family.

Following this blog post, a new product page for PPR will be introduced on our website, where you can get additional information and download our new “Solving the PeopleSoft Change Management Challenge” white paper!