Beginner's Guide: Understanding the Oracle Project Cycle

Understanding the Oracle Project Cycle and Oracle Best Practices

For any functional consultant it is very important to understand the complete project cycle, its phases and documentation related to the same. The phases in any project are listed below -

1. Project Initiation:

-          Team is selected and project group is formed. Roles and Responsibilities are finalized

-          Project Plan is made and Project Strategy is defined.

-          Initial Introductions with Client are made and terms of contract are agreed upon.

-          Success Parameters are defined along with Risk Management Plan and other Project Management initiatives are taken.

2. Requirement Gathering:

-          Team members start the requirement gathering sessions with the concerned user groups.

-          Questionnaires are made

-          Deep Understanding of Organization, Business, Module is gained in the knowledge transfer sessions.

-          Documentation like BRD100 etc are updated on regular basis.

-          Instances are setup for development work.

-          Strategies for Integration with Financials, External applications or vendors are defined.

-          Application Architecture is defined

3. GAP Analysis

-          Requirements gathered are analyzed

-          Work Effort Estimates are made

-          GAP between the requirements and application are documented

-          Discussions held with the client over the gap

-          Work-arounds or Solutions formulated to cover the GAP.

-          After the completion of GAP analysis 1^st milestone of a project is achieved and requirements are moved for development after signoff.

4. Conference Room Piloting

-          Initial Look and Feel of the application to the client

-          Discussion on final features

-          Work Ability Analysis of workarounds and custom forms

-          Sign off for next stage. After completion of GAP analysis the 2 ^nd milestone of project is achieved.

5. User Acceptance Testing

-          User introduction to the application

-          User Testing for all the functionalities

-          User Sign off after review of complete application.

-          User Training and resolving of other issues in the application.

-          3^rd minor milestone achieved.

6. Go-Live

-          Cloning of instance for Production

-          Production Setups audits and confirmation

-          Moving of all the custom objects into Production Environment like interfaces, Reports and Forms.

-          Final Data Entry in Oracle Applications.

-          Major milestone of project is achieved after successful go live.

7. Post Go-Live Support
8. Project Hand Over Activities

Oracle being an advanced and developed product offers AIM Methodology for documentation as well as RICE methodology for estimation. These are used widely and are considered as standards in any Oracle Project. Also note that before starting a project its best to understand the Oracle Best Practices for coding, naming conventions etc. Here is the list of Oracle Standards for Projects as defined by Oracle Corporation itself

-          AIM Methodology for Documentation

-          RICE Methodology for Estimations

-          PL/SQL Coding Standards

-          Naming Conventions in Oracle

These are defined for each phase of a project like BR100 is AIM Document used in Requirement Gathering and during development phase we use RICE estimation of work effort for Interfaces and Reports.

Refer to oracle.com for Oracle Best Practices Documents and Guidelines.