Hi Ryan/May,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and concern. The upgrade process is designed so that you get to experience the actual upgrade functionality and features to start your validation process as soon as May, The subsequent patches 16 and 26 are only tailored for defect fixes on any reported issues between now and the production timeline. The goal is that customers can fully utilize the entire 6 month period for all the necessary validation activities, not wait until application of last patch to start validation, or perform important tasks such as UAT only in that final window. The last patch is meant to provide final stability to the annual upgrade so that any critical issues faced or surfaced during validation can be resolved prior to production go-live on the next annual version.
This is something that we've discussed in our User Group calls previously and it was just a only a minority of customers that were waiting until the last patch was applied to start validation. I agree that 2 weeks or even 1 month is probably not enough time for this, that's why our process provides 6 months end-end.
I am certainly not opposed to coordinating any necessary adjustments as we've always done, but please understand that it would come at the cost of upgrading on an earlier patch version (patch 24 or earlier depending on timing). I would really like to hear the collective thoughts of all our colleagues regarding a proposed change as it would be universal.
