The Challenge:

Although enhancing usage of existing areas of the E-Business Suite or Cloud Applications will typically be characterised by projects of smaller scope when compared to an implementation many of the challenges that organisations face during an implementation are also felt during enhancement; indeed, enhancement introduces additional challenges of its own.

Just as with implementation, enhancements must manage many configurations; although this now becomes a mix of new configurations and changes to existing. One of the first challenges of enhancement is to fully understand the existing setup to identify which areas will be affected by the scope of the new changes, to analyse these to determine what needs to change and what should remain constant – to ensure the aims of the enhancement are met but without any negative effect on existing functionality.

Another complexity of enhancement is how to document the change. There are two competing, contradictory requirements. The first is the need is to document the specific enhancement changes in isolation so that the project team is able to effectively manage them on each environment. The second is the need to maintain overall documentation for the environment. A single document cannot provide both of these perspectives concurrently so enhancement projects often require more duplication of effort in documentation. Of course, this also increases the possibility that things become out of sync.

The tracking of changing during an enhancement project can be more challenging than implementation. For an implementation essentially all non-seeded configuration is new; for enhancement the changes are being managed where other configurations already exist. The potential to miss a changed configuration when applying to another environment through poor documentation etc. is increased.