Humane Technology - PeopleSoft

Last April, Phil Cullen, 36, vice president of quality for PeopleSoft Inc., faced a high-stakes dilemma. His company was riding a breathtaking growth curve for sales of its software - powerful applications that big companies (including AT&T, Boeing, and Toyota) use to automate processes such as payroll, manufacturing, and order fulfillment. Indeed, so many customers had become so addicted to the company's flagship product that they were demanding the new version, PeopleSoft 7, three months ahead of schedule.

Hence the dilemma. PeopleSoft had achieved its remarkable success by doing whatever it took to make customers happy. What would make them happy now was not shipping a major upgrade on time (something that even the best-managed software companies find hard to do) but shipping it early. And that, Cullen understood, meant courting disaster: "We had more than 4,000 employees and more than 2,000 customers, and this upgrade would affect all of them. You don't make a decision like that lightly."

Especially since PeopleSoft 7 is a mission-critical product of awesome complexity. The fully featured version comes with 20,000 pages of technical documentation. Figuring out whether an early release was possible - let alone writing the code for it - was a process "that could take months at most companies," Cullen says.

Not at PeopleSoft. Cullen decided that the best way to explore whether the company could speed up the delivery of PeopleSoft 7 was to take advantage of one of the company's special skills: turning its expertise inward. His team used Web-based tools and a Lotus Notes database that automated the exploration process. The system included a checklist of "universal criteria" that 50 different departments could use to forecast the impact of an early release, to spot the risks and benefits, and to flag potential "showstoppers" - problems that could bring the project to its knees.

In two weeks, Cullen's team consolidated thousands of pieces of information from employees all around the world - all the feedback and follow-up that top management needed to approve an early release. "It was really amazing," Cullen says. "Then again, it's how we do things around here."

Lots of companies compete by selling cutting-edge technology. And lots of companies use cutting-edge technology to make the products they sell. But few companies have pushed as hard as PeopleSoft has to devise new ideas for competing, new models of working, and new ways of using cutting-edge technology to turn those ideas and models into reality. "We're creating a 'virtual' PeopleSoft," declares Steve Zarate, 51, the company's chief information officer. "We're creating an organization that exists not in a specific place, but wherever its people are. We're on the leading edge of what will become commonplace."

PeopleSoft is certainly on the leading edge of the marketplace. It was founded in 1987, went public in 1992, and already commands a stock-market value of more than $10 billion. It is a powerful force in one of the technology field's hottest sectors: enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. As recently as 1994, the company had 650 employees. But it added 2,000 employees in 1997 and expects to add another 3,000 this year. Put simply, PeopleSoft is one of the most successful young companies in the world.

But don't get the wrong idea. Walk the halls of PeopleSoft's campus in Pleasanton, California, 30 miles east of San Francisco, and you sense that this is no collection of humorless code warriors and maladjusted geeks. This is a company that's serious about its values - and one of its most serious values is fun. Employees call themselves "People People" - and act like the luckiest people in the world. There's even a house band, the Raving Daves, which was initially funded, and is still occasionally fronted, by guitarist Dave Duffield, PeopleSoft's president, chairman, and CEO.

Duffield, 57, is PeopleSoft personified. He has silver hair, a healthy tan, a permanent twinkle in his eyes. He likes to compare PeopleSoft to a cougar: "We're fast, nimble, and competitive, but we have a cuddly way about us. I don't let bad behavior enter the place. And if it sneaks in, I get rid of it."