I was recently reintroduced to the Scrum methodology by a new IT manager who wanted the team to start integrating related concepts into how projects and changes are performed and rolled out. Having been forced into an older school of thought for several years, I hadn’t thought about Scrum in a while, so I looked up the root of the word again and reminded myself of its relation to the game of rugby. I started to imagine our IT team as a huddle of wet, muddy people completely worn out from the last play, trying to refocus ourselves and plan our next move after a short stretch of chaos. I don’t think "chaos" was the intention behind Scrum; but that’s how I visualized it, most likely due to my own experiences in various IT projects.
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Yes, a project can be implemented without a plan in place, but that makes knowing where you are in the process complicated. A project plan doesn’t have to be a 2,500 to 5,000 line document that becomes so unwieldy you need a whole crew of PMO staff to manage it, report on it, and direct people. However, a plan that flows from start to finish can help you avoid missed processes, missed deadlines and misunderstanding.
I’ve always believed that Oracle provides the kind of system and tools that can benefit small- to mid-size companies. With my accounting background, I often found myself working with smaller companies that were “just getting by” from an accounting perspective. What I mean is that while users were dedicated, they may not have had degrees or were simply overwhelmed by a system that was very labor intensive (i.e. journals done on paper, approved, sent to management, and then manually entered into the system). Or, in the case of one company, if I wanted to know the AP Liability, I would have to have the Payables Clerk 10-key her invoice inbox. If she entered the invoice, it would automatically get paid with the next check run due to a lack of proper term calculation; so instead of entering invoices when they came in, she waited until payment.
One of the things I love the most about my job is that I get to help my clients find the best solutions to fit their needs. I think a lot of people say that, but in sales there is normally always a hidden agenda, a backend incentive to push one solution over the other. It’s rare to be in a position to simply educate your clients, show them options and then help them make a decision that truly is in their best interest, even if it’s not necessarily in yours.
The Oracle calendar creation form exists throughout the system: General Ledger, Receivables, Purchasing, OPM, etc., all have at least one calendar form. And of course, with different Oracle development teams creating these forms, they can and often do function in entirely different ways.
One example: unlike the GL calendar, the OPM Financial Calendar new creation line starts at the end of all the months previously created. The form does not auto-query, and does not take the cursor to the next new row. As a result, our client, who was very familiar with the General Ledger version of the calendar form, unknowingly created an issue with the OPM calendar.
The user did not query the existing periods in the calendar to start with, or go to the end of the list of existing periods, therefore the period was created with a range of 01-JAN-2005 through 31-JAN-2016. You might think this isn’t necessarily a big deal, but for processing, it’s huge. Oracle not only validates the records in the date range, it also validates all ranges of the calendar. Even though the test records were all prior to 01-JAN-2016, it didn’t matter. We could not execute any jobs because of “duplicate date range”. The 01-JAN-2005-start date included every record ever created.
