Oracle Unified Method (OUM)

Why Partner with Oracle and Oracle Unified Method (OUM)

The Oracle PartnerNetwork will empower your company with exceptional resources to distinguish your offerings from the competition, seize opportunities, and increase your sales.
OUM has evolved to become the single methodology for all Oracle products – supporting the entire Enterprise IT lifecycle. Every successful project depends on a mature, enriched methodology. OUM is your map to success!
OUM is Oracle’s standards-based method that enables the entire Enterprise Information Technology (IT) lifecycle. It provides an implementation approach that is rapid, broadly adaptive, and business-focused. OUM includes a comprehensive project and program management framework and materials to support Oracle's growing focus on enterprise-level IT strategy, architecture, and governance
OUM is available to Oracle PartnerNetwork Diamond, Platinum, and Gold Partners as a benefit of membership.
Key Benefits

• More Focused Effort – OUM enables projects to clearly define business scope and needs to create architectural models of the enterprise. This planning results in tighter scope control, more accurate business understanding, and a firm foundation for client acceptance.
• Built-in Flexibility – By combining activities and tasks in different ways, OUM can be applied to many types of information technology software development and implementation projects.
• Saves Time – Seasoned information technology practitioners representing years of experience have contributed their knowledge to OUM. Project teams can take advantage of this experience by leveraging these leading practices along with industry standards.
• Higher Quality – OUM subscribes to an iterative approach that incorporates testing and validation throughout the lifecycle, rather than testing for quality only at the end of the project.
• More Cost Effective – OUM facilitates improved control of project expenses by using a flexible work breakdown structure that allows you to perform only necessary tasks.
• Reduced Project Risk – Implementing an iterative, broadly applicable method mitigates requirements mismatch. A key focus of each iteration in OUM is to identify and reduce the most significant project risks. This ensures that the most critical risks are addressed as early as possible in the project lifecycle, which results in a measurable reduction of schedule and budget risks.
  

What's in Oracle Unified Method
The Oracle Unified Method offering provides you with a comprehensive toolkit:

• Overview Material – Provides an overview of OUM's approach to IT projects, including the industry standards upon which OUM is based.
• Guidelines – Phase, process, task, role, and work product guidelines cover every aspect of an Oracle-based business solution.
• Templates – Templates enable fast and easy creation of high quality work products.
• Tailored Work Breakdown Structure – These standards enable an easy start in managing your project.
  

OUM Principal

This is based out of five main principles

1. Business: Focus on the business and assure stake holder acceptance and delivery of the development’s efforts.
2. Architecture: Define architecture before resources are committed for development and implementation.
3. Adaptability: Encourages adaptability for scalable delivery across small and large projects possessing disparate resources and skill levels.
4. Implementation: Provides rapid implementation techniques to ensure business solutions in short time frames
5. Standards: Leverage the Unified Modeling Language and the Unified Software Development Process
   

OUM is able to…
Support the complete range of Oracle technology projects including

• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Enterprise Integration
• Custom Software
• Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)
• Business Intelligence (BI)
• Enterprise 2.0
• Enterprise Application Implementation
• Software Upgrade
  

Currently Oracle Consulting using this methods, tools support a complete range of technology engagements.
OUM FOCUS AREAS
These 3 Focus Areas provide a frameworks for Enterprise level planning, Project and program management and Implementing .

1. Envision Focus Area deals with development and maintenance of enterprise level IT strategy, architecture, and governance. This also assists in the transition from enterprise-level planning and strategy activities to the identification and initiation of specific projects.
2. Manage Focus Area provides a framework in which all types of projects can be planned, estimated, controlled, and completed in a consistent manner.
3. Implement Focus Area This focus Area provides a framework to develop and implement Oracle-based business solutions .
   

Next let take a quick overview for Implement Focus area which got replacement of old methods like AIM Foundation, AIM for Business Flows, Compass, Results Roadmap, etc.
Understanding OUM's Implement Focus

This focus area typically based out of milestone based approach. Typical Milestone are:

• Life cycle objective milestone
• Life cycle architecture milestone
• Initial operation capability milestone
• System in production milestone
• Sign-off milestone
  

As mention earlier this comprises of 5 phases and 14 processes, details as follows

 
OUM Project Phases
The Workflows within an OUM project are categorized into five phases: 1) Inception, 2) Elaboration, 3) Construction, 4) Transition, and 5) Production. These phases are described below:

(A) Phase I: Inception :As the first phases in the project life cycle. Major goal of this phase is to achieve concurrence among all stakeholders on the life cycle objectives for the project. Kick off's, review , high-level business requirements along with initial project plan is being targeted in this phase only.

(B) Phase II: Elaboration :This is the second phases in the project life cycle, where major focus would be to develop the detailed requirements models, partition the solution, develop functional prototyping, and baseline the architecture of the system.

(C) Phase III: Construction :As the third phases in the project life cycle, Construction focuses on design, implementation, and testing of functions to develop a complete system.

(D) Phase IV: Transition :This typically consist from installation onto the production system through the UAT and launch of the live application, open and ready for business.

(E) Phase V: Production : The goal of the Production phase is to operate the newly developed system, assess the success of the system, and support the users. This includes: monitoring the system; acting appropriately to ensure continued operation; measuring system performance; operating and maintaining supporting systems; responding to help requests, error reports and feature requests by users; and managing the applicable change control process so that defects and new features are prioritized and assigned to future releases.

OUM Process - Typically OUM process defined as "A discipline or sub-project that defines a set of tasks related by subject matter, required skills, and common dependencies". A process usually spans several phases in an approach.
All OUM tasks are also organized into processes that group related tasks together. Project team members are assigned to these groupings according to their specialization and background. OUM includes the following 14 processes

1. BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS [RD] – Objective of the Business Requirements process is to identify, refine, and prioritize the business requirements for the proposed system
2. REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS [RA]– Objective of the Requirements Analysis process is to further analyze the requirements identified during the Business Requirements process as the basis for analysis and design.
3. ANALYSIS [AN]– Objective of the Analysis process is to analyze, refine, and structure the system requirements via the Analysis Model.
4. DESIGN [DS] – Objective of the Design process is to translate requirements into a system design that meets all functional and supplemental requirements.
5. IMPLEMENTATION [IM] – Objective of the Implementation process is to develop the final system, through a number of iterative steps.
6. TESTING [TE]– The Testing process is an integrated approach to testing the quality and conformance of all elements of the new system.
7. PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT [PT]– Objective of the Performance Management process is to define, construct, and execute an effective approach to managing performance throughout the project life cycle.
8. TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE [TA]– Objective of the Technical Architecture process is to design an information system architecture that realizes the business vision.
9. DATA ACQUISITION AND CONVERSION [CV]– Objective of the Data Acquisition and Conversion process is to convert all legacy data necessary for the operation of the new system.
10. DOCUMENTATION [DO]– Objective of the Documentation process is to develop documentation that augments product manuals with information about custom software and business procedures.
11. ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE MANAGEMENT [OCM]– Objective of the Organizational Change Management process is to identify the human and organizational challenges of the project in order to mitigate risk.
12. TRAINING [TR]– Objective of the Training process is to adequately train the project team to begin the project and train the users to run the new system.
13. TRANSITION [TS]– Objective of the Transition process is to install the system and go production.
14. OPERATIONS AND SUPPORT [PS]– Objective of the Operations and Support process is to monitor and respond to system problems to fix errors and performance problems and plan enhancements.
    

Believe with this method companies get simplified project management, improved planning, reduced risk which make them manage project within time within Budget. Next post will more the details for other Focus area. Keep watching this space.