Do Not Get Complacent

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You have gone live. You are now a success, right? At least you are until something breaks or it is time to upgrade to stay supported so you should just let something alone that is working, right? Hey if it is not broken, there is no need to fix it. Wrong.

Set up a schedule for applying patches starting with go live and stick to that schedule. Major patch releases generally come out with some regularity; minipacks (the ones that roll up several changes into one patch that targets a product group, e.g., HR, GL, AP, AR) are released when needed and many can be counted on to come out at least on a quarterly basis. That usually means that if you make the decision to start a patch cycle on a quarterly basis, you will have several patches to send through the paces every quarter. This also means that you will make upgrading less time consuming and less painful when the time comes; especially for just upgrading to the next Maintenance Pack Patch (say from 11.5.6 to 11.5.8), because much of the work that the megapatch would otherwise have to do will already have been done.

Okay, I know what many people in this situation may be thinking. You just lived through it and your wounds are just starting to heal. It is not really broken, so we should not have to do anything to it if it is not broken. If you start tinkering with things, something might break. Yes, something might. It might also be that you will have a problem somewhere with a piece of the system and try to get support and they will ask you what version of a minipack you are on, what version of a form you are on, or what version of the system you are on. You may have something broken in Production the week before year-end closing, you are in the middle of a severity 1 iTAR that is waiting on you to get to the current minipack level, and you are trying to shove through patches in Production without testing in the other environments to allow the company to close the books on time. You are patching in fire fighting mode, patches that you could have had already in and taken the time to implement and fully test to ensure that what you are doing is working and not breaking anything else.

The complexity of the system means that you have to try to stay as current as you can.

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