9.2 Upgrade Change Management
American Electric Power (AEP) is one of the largest electric energy companies in the U.S. serving the Ohio Valley and a large part of the Southeast states. Through multiple subsidiaries, they cover over 200,000 square miles and serve more than 5.5 million customers.
AEP engaged Elire to lead organizational change management activities in support of their PeopleSoft upgrade from 9.0 to 9.2. The Elire team developed a comprehensive change management strategy, which included a training approach and communications plan. Elire built training materials which included written job aids and pre-recorded demos, and live webinars. The team also created a set of training materials prior to user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure that the UAT participants were as efficient as possible.
Elire implemented an Evergreen Strategy for the content produced in order to minimize future content maintenance. Any areas where content would need updating were noted, and the team is currently working to create support materials with updated process maps, RACI, and a communication strategy for ongoing release notes.
AEP has a complex matrix environment with operations teams across multiple locations, including offshore. Furthermore, the offshore support added another layer of complexity as the offshore team has different training and communication requirements than the onshore team. Additionally, AEP had other enterprise projects overlap which has had a significant impact on the project timeline and scope. Another area that proved challenging was not having an AEP change management resource to partner with the Elire team on organizational change management throughout the project.
Elire plans to deliver training ahead of a tentative go-live in August 2022. Several hundred end users and UAT participants will utilize Elire’s training to ensure successful adoption of the upgraded application. Project communications are ongoing and inform stakeholders on status results and project milestones.
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