Application Health Check

By Venkat Manthripragada

Measure the benefits of complex mission critical packaged Enterprise Applications is a

complex task. Organizations often look at intangible benefits or joining the bandwagon of the
peers while making the decision of implementing a Packaged Enterprise Application are
missing the critical factors to be focused for maximizing the value of the Applications. The
new generation CIOs and CTOs challenged by the value addition from their divisions are
critically reviewing the applications implemented and realizing that the value of the
application is not maximized owing to some unknown reasons. Over focusing on Change
Management which was traditionally termed as a major reason for failure of packaged
Enterprise Application Implementation is not true any longer because new knowledge
workforce is more tuned to change than its previous generation.
To confirm the gut feeling of not maximizing the value and establish the key reasons for such
a gut feel, Organizations should look at employ an independent expert group to conduct a
Health Check of the application and bring up the issues associated with the way the
application has been deployed or being used.

Why Health Check

Packaged Applications deployment for business is a comprehensive and complex

exercise. Making the pre developed application fitting to the requirements of a
typical business environment will lead to multiple deviations plugged by either
customizations or by work around solutions.

As the modern business environments are highly dynamic and the pressures of
new global model of business keeps forcing the businesses to change the way
the business is conducted, new business processes keeps emerging
continuously. Existing business processes will become redundant because of
new process or new technology emerging to bring in huge value and savings. In
those conditions, packaged applications deployed sometime ago considering
the business environment of that time may consist of some redundant and
outdated processes.

As the pre developed packaged application used by an enterprise for

conducting its day to day business, huge amount of deviation can creep in. End
users of packaged applications deployed at a customer location will not align to
the new process fully and will take deviations. They however will keep the
requirements of MIS in view while deviating from the process.

In some of the cases the implementation partner may not deploy the best of
the breed consultants to implement the product leading to redundancy, work
around solutions and pieces of processes will be left disjoint leading to business
processes to be executed outside the packaged processes. There is also a
possibility of not exploring the capabilities of the packaged applications

All the factors of disjoint processes resulted either because of poor

implementation or because of persistent deviations from processes will lead to
consuming more resources and de-motivate the workforce who normally expect
streamlined business execution post implementation. This will lead to a
negative return on investment for the company.

When you as a CTO/CIO/CEO/CFO started believing that the implementation of

packaged application - be it any ERP product such as Oracle, SAP or PeopleSoft
or a Banking Software such as Finacle or Flexcube or a Learning Management
System such as OLM, Saba or SumTotal or CRM applications such as Siebel - is
not giving you the expected return on investment and not smoothening the
business processes or resulting into value add for your business, it is time for a
health check. The packaged application deployed with certain goals in mind
should be cross checked for the reasons for not meeting the goals.

Application Health Check is one sure way to assess the value of an application
deployed at your business and bring up measures that can bring up value back
into your business.

This article will briefly discuss about the intended value of an Application
Health Check and the Methodology of conducting the health check. This
document will be useful as a primer to understand the value and methodology
and can be used as a high level guideline while choosing a partner to conduct
the Health Check. Various points discussed in the article should be applied
basing on the type of the application such as ERP or CRM and the context in
which Health Check may be envisaged.

Key benefits

Packaged Application Health Check is a third party audit of the current

configuration of the application and matches the same with the required
configuration basing on the new business models emerging over a period of
time. Application Health Check will bring the following key benefits -

(i) Supporting the Evolving Business Requirements

As the business environments are highly dynamic and business
processes keep evolving with time because of social changes and
technology development, some of the configured processes will
become redundant. There may be a lot of new business processes
emerging because of new global business models emerging involving
huge outsourcing efforts in various business areas. Packaged
applications are highly flexible and it is possible to eliminate the
redundancy and configure new processes if a conscious and
synchronized exercise of assessing the same takes place with the help
of a group that can view the application objectively and apply some
lateral thinking.

Application Health Check by Venkat Manthripragada

(ii) Leveraging the Application fully
When an enterprise plans deployment of a packaged application, a
usual step is to identify the key business processes that have to be
automated to reap the maximum benefits. This will lead to ignoring
other features which appears like a part of the minor features. Such
features may become frontline issues leading to severe breakdown of
business processes. Application Health Check can establish such cases
easily and support leveraging the available features of a packaged
application.

(iii) Leveraging the Application Evolution

Business Applications follow an evolutionary path with new features
and technology continuously upgraded into future versions. Once a
version of a packaged application gets deployed, installation of
service packs or upgrading to next possible versions are not the
easiest of the options considering the effort and investment. The
teams believe that if we have 80% coverage we are doing fine but
may be if a correct assessment take place we may realize that the
loss because of dysfunctions in the applications may be higher than
the cost involved in installing a service pack or upgrade to the newer
version. Application Health Check will give the opportunity for such
assessment. If we look at say the work around solutions designed at
the time of implementation of the application because of non
availability of a feature or a feature not completely supported we
may realize that majority of dysfunctions of the applications are
located here only and because of completion of features or
availability of new features we can eliminate some of the
workaround solutions leading to improvement in productivity.

(iv) Streamlining Reporting

Reporting is one area that requires maintenance continuously
throughout the lifecycle of a packaged application. With dynamic
changes in management in business, the reporting requirements keep
changing. If not a new report required each manager may like to see
the reports in the way easy for him/her to interpret easily. Some of
such issues may be handled with the help of specific reporting tools
attached to the packaged applications such as Crystal Reports. A
majority of the emerging requirements relates to redefining the
whole structure. Because the application cannot be changed
continuously for emerging reporting requirements the users may
resort to use the system to bring up a basic report and dump the
result into any easily editable application such as Excel and keep
sending the MIS reports from there. This leads to lower productivity.
Application Health Check can establish cases where flexibility is

Application Health Check by Venkat Manthripragada

 required basing on the experience and suggest development of a few
new reports. Change of configuration sometimes can help bringing up
reports in required format.

(v) Fitment to Organizational Dynamics

As enterprises emerge continuously and new addition of business
lines or businesses themselves may come in, business processes keep
changing dramatically. An organization with a certain set of business
lines and number of employees will keep evolving dynamically with
growth and will require new controls and processes. A mid size
organization may prefer to centralize the Purchasing function which
may require new process mapping and approval cycles. Continuous
updating of Workflow with the dynamics is required.

(vi) Support for future application deployment

If the feelers of utilization of the application is maximized it is
important to conduct a health check. If there is a plan to deploy
more features of the applications, Health Check will be a good
starting point. Health check establishes the new features required for
new business processes.

Methodology

Application Health Check should be conducted with an Objective view of the

system and preferably by an independent partner to establish the gaps and find
remedies for maximizing the application value for the enterprise.
A systematic seven step approach will help in conducting the Application Health
Check and bring up a report.

Step 1 – Assess the existing Application Deployment

Before conducting the health check it is important to understand the existing
deployment model of the application. The current application business
processes.
This study is more of a study through the artifacts generated during the
implementation of the application such as As-Is scenarios at the time of
implementation of the application, the expected business scenarios, Gap
Analysis, Functional Design documents if there are customizations.
The technical architecture comprising of the structure of the instances used,
server configurations, load balancing if used across a cluster of servers and so
on should be studied.

Step 2 - Identify the Major Issues from User Perspective

After studying the documents created during implementation, discussions with
the user groups that are using the application to assess their view of the
current system, the difficulties, and bottlenecks and so on should be taken up.

Application Health Check by Venkat Manthripragada

Step 3 – Understand the typical business requirements
Understand the business requirements that were attempted to be mapped in to
the packaged application with the help of key users, project managers and
stakeholders to establish a business case.

Step 4 – Study the Application

The actual application deployment should be studied to understand how the
application has been configured, how the workflows configured, what
customizations were built, list of the issue tickets created ever since the
application went live and the resolutions. This is through checking the
application deployment on the clone of production instance of the application.

Step 5 – Identifying the Gaps

Compare the business requirements understood as a part of study with the
current configurations to identify the gaps in the application. Also the
comparison of the gaps with the features of next versions should take place.
The issues identified may relate to performance such as response times or
execution time for a background or nightly scheduled process or running of
planning engine or may relates to in efficient processes leading to consumption
of higher physical resources than expected.

Step 6 – Prioritization
The list of gaps generated basing on study of the application deployment
should be prioritized basing on criteria where urgent improvement areas should
be highlighted. The prioritization depends on multiple factors such as business
show stoppers or high business impact scenarios, budget required for making
required corrections, time required to reach the desired results and so on.

Step 7 – Reporting and Recommendations

The issues from the current system identified basing on the Health Check
conducted on the applications should be incorporated in the final Health Check
report in a structured way showing business critical and easily solvable issues
toping the list.
The recommendations may include suggestion of a small focused project for
correcting the prioritized issues or installing a service pack or a patch set with
functional corrections or even a suggestion towards upgrading the application
to the next versions.

Conclusion

Application Health Check is a sure way to approach the decisions relating to

- Maximizing the value of the applications implemented
- Upgrading the applications from previous versions to current versions

Application Health Check by Venkat Manthripragada

 - Moving towards newer technologies to attain better value than on old
technologies
- Eliminate waste and redundancy in processes consuming more resources
leading to loss of physical and human resources.

Health Check should be conducted by a highly experienced team that has

experience across versions of the target applications and can interpret the
functional and system related issues correctly.

Application Health Check by Venkat Manthripragada