doe laboratory

Advisory Services Application Roadmap

Elire’s client, DOE Laboratory is one of the national laboratories of the United States Department of Energy, currently managed by the Battelle Energy Alliance. Since its inception, DOE has been instrumental in nuclear research for the U.S. Government. Today, DOE performs work in each of the strategic goal areas of DOE: energy, national security, science and environment. DOE is the nation’s leading center for nuclear energy research and development, with roughly 5,000 employees.

scope of project

Elire’s Strategic Advisory Services (SAS) team was brought into DOE Laboratory (DOE) to complete an application roadmap, assessing whether the DOE team should upgrade PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 to version 9.2, or migrate to Oracle Cloud HCM. The SAS team was tasked with partnering with the client to understand DOE’s current state HCM processes such as open enrollment and merit planning. The team focused on understanding and solving for current state process disconnects, as part of a broader set of decision criteria to be used when selecting the best-fit future application.

The Elire team hosted working sessions to identify current state processes which were based on workgroups such as HR and technical staff, benefits, and compensation groups. In addition to disconnects and pain points, other functional and technical requirements were captured and validated.

Part of the engagement included a requirements fit-gap assessment, which was essential to ensure that the scope of the future state project could be set with confidence, and that appropriate technical and functional resources would be included to solve for known gaps and partial fits. With DOE operating as a federal agency, security was a high priority to ensure processes with technical and process changes still met security regulations. The future state application also needed to meet FedRAMP certification requirements.

the challenge

The team at DOE had several challenges to overcome. During the assessment project, there was substantial resistance to change. Additionally, there was uncertainty surrounding the potential for changing job roles and responsibilities, which Elire then took steps to address and to ensure that employees felt confident in direction that leadership was moving the lab. Elire worked to effectively bridge the partnership gap which helped alleviate concerns amongst staff.

The team managed through a tight timeframe to accomplish tasks and mobilize project resources onsite. Support for PeopleSoft 9.1 ended December 31st, 2019 which made it so there was an elevated security risk should go-live be postponed past this hard December 31st deadline.

In addition, regulations within the federal space required increased security measures and limits on the kinds of data the team was able to use in testing. Aligning architecture with security policy and in particular data organization was a challenge, as Oracle Cloud was early in the FedRAMP approval process. The Cloud HCM application itself was FedRAMP certified, however the Oracle Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) initially was not.

success delivered

Over the course of an eight-week sprint, the SAS team captured requirements and performed a fit/gap analysis for the proposed Oracle Cloud HCM solution. Deliverables included current business process documentation and identification of disconnects, roles and responsibilities (RACI), an Oracle Cloud HCM requirements workbook, and decision criteria analysis. Creation of a business plan to migrate DOE from PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud HCM was also a key component of the project.

Elire provided recommendations for the timeline and schedule of the Oracle Cloud HCM implementation and created a roadmap which provided details on how DOE would engage with Cloud HCM in a long-term strategy. The team reviewed over 690 requirements, and the Elire team found that 88% were a fit in the key process areas of HR, benefits, payroll, compensation, performance management, usability, and reporting. Go-live was completed on-time and within budget on 4/19/2019.

Interested in learning more about how Elire can assist your Advisory team? Visit our Advisory Services Page or contact our team at [email protected].