Improving forecasting capabilities by creating standard change management processes

VERIZON · FINANCIAL PLANNING & ANALYSIS CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Business Need
Verizon’s finance planning teams used Oracle Hyperion to submit budgets, forecast results, and produce reports across multiple business lines. As the business planning and reporting needs change, such as when new cost centers are added or moved, the system requires regular updates to ensure accurate flow of financial data. Updates to the financial data is submitted by end users and rolled up in data hierarchies, which is ultimately maintained by multiple supporting technology teams. The magnitude of data, complexity of the business, and constant number of enhancements/updates, means that one error can lead to several negative downstream impacts. Finance users and technology teams needed a shared way to identify those risks before release.

The Space Between
Software changes typically move through a series of steps: define what is needed, build the change, test it, and release it. This is often referred to as the software development life cycle, or SDLC. User acceptance testing (UAT) is the step where the people who need the update test it out in a safe environment and confirm that it is working as expected before it goes live.

At Verizon, this UAT step was not formally established in a structured process for these finance system updates. Each business line had its own data and reporting requirements, so a change that worked for one team could cause problems for another.

Working in System
This required an end to end business process to be put into place in order to coordinate across the different groups. Through a change management process, people could submit requests for system enhancements for approval. These functional business requirements were captured, qualified, and converted into testing scripts. A lot of work went into overseeing the process and working back with leadership to prioritize and bundle updates, assign and manage testers, meet technical deadlines, communicate progress, and provide training or assistance where needed.

Impact
The new UAT process gave finance teams a consistent role in validating system changes before they went live. It made requirements clearer for technology teams, handoffs more visible, and provided a standard repeatable process for updating the systems. Ultimately, it created a way to improve the capability of the systems to perform the tasks that the people using it required.