FSM in Romania

Last week I went to Oracle Romania in Bucharest to deliver a Functional Setup Manager course.

Bucharest is an interesting city, lots of history and lots of potential for the future.

I've lost track how many times in the last year I've taught FSM, but each time I learn something new myself.  The students on the course were all internal Oracle employees and many of them already know something about Fusion Applications.  It is this sort of group that is the most challenging (in a good way) as they ask intelkligent questions from a basis of knowledge.

We built some example implementation projects and then analysed the structure of the task lists and the way in which FSM gives us added value above just simply being a mechanism to route us to the correct UI to perform some setup.

So, here's a brief summary of the questions that were raised:

• Why does FSM let us allocate tasks to people who do not have the correct permissions to perform the setup tasks?

• Why does FSM not highlight or deal with duplicate tasks?

• If FSM can add new setup to a target environment and update changed setup, why can't it deal with deleting redundant setup?

I'm sure the product teams are well aware of these questions, but it would be interesting to know if and when they will be tackled.

Thanks to all the students on my course for a fun and reqarding couple of days!  Looking forward to going back to Bucharest some time soon.

Fusion HCM Gotcha

I deliver Fusion HCM training courses on an ever more frequent basis these days.  Today I'm writing this post while waiting for a plane to Bucharest where I'll be running a Fusion Functional Setup Manager course.  One of my colleagues is delivering Fusion Talent Management in London this week, and a Fusion HCM Implementation course in Prague next week.  And so it goes on...

When we talk to students or customers about Talent Reviews, we show them how to configure the page and also discuss all the 'sexy' features in Talent Review like mapping the 'Risk of loss'.  But this always leads to the questions "How do we determine the risk?", "Where do we do the configuration?".

Well here's the catch.  In order to configure all the predictive analytics, you need another module - Oracle Data Mining.  Hmmm... didn't hear that mentioned in the sales demo.

Gotcha!

Review of 2012

As the new year starts, I thought I'd just review a few of the highlights (well, for me anyway) of 2012.

In March I was invited with 2 colleagues to go to Redwood Shores to learn all about Fusion HCM.  The plan was that we could then return to the UK and begin to assist Oracle University with training students in some newly released Fusion courses.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but came back inspired by the new application and eager to begin delivering training.

I didn't have to wait long as within a couple of weeks, we were straight out to Paris to train a large consulting firm which had won one of the first Fusion HCM implementation projects in Europe.  We spent 3 long weeks covering all aspects of Fusion HCM and had tremendous help from Oracle product managers and developers.  This was to be the first of an ever increasing number of courses to deliver.

In April, I went to Collaborate 2012 and was intrigued by the number of people talking about Fusion Applications but not really showing much understanding of the subject.  As a consequence, my colleague Richard Atkins and I set up a LinkedIn group (Fusion HCM Interest Group) with the aim of promoting articles about actual facts on Fusion HCM!  This turned out to be more successful than we anticipated and by the end of 2012 we had nearly 500 members.

In June I was back in Las Vegas at OHUG.  By now, Fusion HCM was becoming a much hotter topic and there were many good presentations on the subject, particularly from Oracle.

Following the conference theme, I was back in the US for OpenWorld in October and followed the announcements about Fusion Applications with much interest. 

All the time, we were delivering more frequent Fusion HCM courses, and by the end of the year we had more than 30 under our belts both in the UK and EU.  It was interesting to see the course membership change over time, beginning with internal Oracle people (yes, they needed training too) on to big consultancies and now seeing more customers.

In November, I was at the Oracle European HCM Summit and learnt a lot about the progress of the project in PAris I referred to in an earlier paragraph.  It was fun to see who the 'theory' we taught had been put into practice. 

Finally, December brought the UKOUG conference where I spoke about Fusion Functional Setup Manager and attended many really useful presentations on Fusion HCM. It was good to see the numbers of people interested steadily growing.

Of course, I mustn't forget the UKOUG HCM SIGs which we run 3 times a year.  During 2012, we began to see more Fusion topics coming forward and Taleo too.  More to come in 2013.

So what might 2013 bring?  Well, I'm already booked to go to Collaborate in Denver where I'll be delivering 2 presentations on Fusion HCM; OHUG in Dallas in June (presentations submitted)  and OpenWorld (presentations being formulated in my head!).  So, looks like another interesting year!

Happy New Year!