Completion Report

Project Summary:

Background

JAMS and eTime applications required to be migrated to the new virtualised environment as their current location is being decommissioned

JAMS - the Journal Auto-upload Management System is a web-based application used by System Accounting Section (SAS)

eTime  - the timesheet for guaranteed hours and research staff.

Scope

• Migrate JAMS to the new virtualised environment
• Migrate eTime to the new virtualised environment
• Scope is to only include what is already there and to migrate it to a supported IS Apps environment

Objectives

• To migrate JAMS application to a secure and managed IS virtual environment
• To migrate eTime application to a secure and managed IS virtual environment

Deliverables

Out Of Scope

• Any enhancements to either systems (Scope is to only include what is already there and to migrate it to a supported IS Apps environment)
  • The 3 other JAMS processes are Ant-driven runnable jar files scheduled by cron jobs which run in the background
  • Any existing or new eTime JIRAs that are present in other projects
  • Disaster recovery testing
• Bamboo is not to be included at this time for JAVA applications
• Upgrade to JAVA v8 is out of scope
• Upgrade to JAVA v7 is out of scope (optional)
• Upgrade to Tomcat v7 is out of scope (optional)

Benefits

Success Criteria

• That JAMS application continues to function as at present
• That eTime application continues to function as at present

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 50 days

Staff Usage Actual: 58 days

Staff Usage Variance: 16%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

At the start of this project dev tech resourcing was very tight earlier and there were delays and conflicts on in this project when a mentor was not available to assist the dev tech technician for 3 weeks. This resulted in progress not being made until after the 20 April, by which time other projects were also sharing the same resource.

Dev tech were very stretched, and the detailed information is within PICCLs - 2, 5, and 6

However normally there are experienced dev tech people that can be called upon to help.

Resources were switched between different dev tech technicians and back again until a contractor was employed to progress both JAMS and eTime. The contractor was able to devote his time 100% on FIN113 until it made progress and assistance was also made available to help him when required.

All the issues and replanning affected the budget used and the budget had to be increased to accomplish the project work for JAMS and eTime before the hard deadline.

Upgrading the versions of Tomcat and JAVA did not prove to be as easy as was indicated, however the benefit of having upgrading then is that it has resulted in that the end of support has been extended

Some hardcoding was found in JAMS and to fix this it was replaced by symbolic links to make it future proof in Dev, Test and Live

• JSTL had different versions  on Tomcat and JAVA  re WAR file, only affected JAMS

Although it was a tricky start to the project, once these items were resolved, it has been a successfull project where the hard delovery milestones have been met for both JAMS and eTime.

The project budget was increased to 65 days, however the project completed in 58 days when it closed

Key Learning Points:

No development work identified in the Brief for this  project, so Bamboo work was not included, - which in retrospect would have been the better way to go. However the Dev Team also did not have available resources to complete any extra work in time for the deadline

Some hardcoding was spotted by a developer assisting with a query. Once the implementation was reviewed this was sorted out in Dev, Test and Live. If a developer had been working on the project then this would have been found earlier.

• In future migration projects, a point to take away from this one is, at the review of the Brief the developer should verify if there is any hard coding to be taken account of, before making the decision whether a developer is required for the project.

At the Brief stage the decision was made

1. not to use Bamboo
2. that there was no development skill required - resulting in that there was noi developer skipp booked onto the project

Outstanding issues:

No known outstanding issues

The eTime deployment sign off review and Closure have been signed off by Finance with the proviso that the Payroll extract works as expected. Finance do not expect there to be any issues, but if there are then they would be picked up by the programme.