January 2015

The Division has built up reliance on a number of key products over the years to assist in project and service delivery.

This project would apply relevant upgrades to the following products as required:

JIRA

JIRA Agile

Bamboo

ASTA

We will look to upgrade to latest stable and supported versions of the products above. This will not review new functionality and only concentrate on software upgrades.

Current feedback is that

There will be no ASTA Upgrade this year

The JIRA upgrades are not required until April.

Bamboo Upgrade will also start in April.

This project will now start in April.  

System Monitoring Solution - Implementation

Depending on the outcome of the INF107 project, this may be a procurement or an in-house build.

The project effort for this year is 50 days, but this is a multi-year project over three years.

This project will start in May.

Decommission Obsolete Infrastructure

Category: Core Funding

Milestones

RAG Status

GREEN

Report by David Watters for January 2015

Achievements this Period

• Continuing progress with TSM
• Ongoing work on planning what needs to be decommissioned
• Milestones for remainder of project established

Issues

• Problems with TSM implementation in DEV

Next Steps

• Work on analysing and cataloguing obsolete elements in infrastructure to be completed
• Prioritisation of what is to be decommissioned to be carried out by project team
• TSM to be implemented in DEV
• TSM to be tested in TEST & LIVE
• Password Manager deployment to be completed

INF106 (AP45-032)

New Application Tier Replacement

Category: Compliance

Milestones

RAG Status

GREEN

Report by Adam Wadee for January 2015

Achievements in Last Period

• The live deployment and migrations took place as planned on Wednesday 10th December.
• Handover between Dev Tech and Production Management has also been done.
• The Deployment Sign off Review has been completed.
• Closure report drafted and questionnaire sent to stakeholders.

Issues

• Closure milestone revised due to conflict on PM time.

Next Steps

• Close project

INF107 (AP45-067)

Environment Monitoring System

Category: Core Funding

Milestones

RAG Status

GREEN

Report by Maurice Franceschi for January 2015

The project milestones have been moved back further, in part due to Imperial not having availability until March, but also, the project team have decided to look at whether existing tools in use by Unix, Architecture and Edina coudl provide our solution.

This reduced the amount of time left to do the follow on project to procure/build a solution, so the effort estimated has been reduced in this year and moved to 15/16 and 16/17.

The staus of the project remains Green, but any further slippage would set it to Amber.

Achievements in Last Period

• Sheffield visted and assessed
• Visit Imperial by end of January - not achieved
• Set up demo of EG
• Confirm third institution to visit by end of January

Issues

• Two Amber risks - last reviewed mid-November - no change and still pertinent

Next Steps

• Demo of EG and assessment
• Visit Imperial by end of March
• Assess potential of Zenoss
• Assess potential of SCOM
• Assess potential of newRelic  

INF108 (AP45-034)

Automated Server Builds

Category: Discretionary

Milestones

RAG Status

GREEN

Report by Colin Watt for January 2015

Achievements this period

• First bi-weekly team meetings have taken place.
• Members of Dev Tech are now spending ring-fenced time with ITI Unix in their offices at KB, ensuring dedicated effort on the project with ITI. This has engendered a good positive project team working environment.
• PM has gathered initial "team temperature" in terms of what the individual team members hope to gain from working on the project, and the obstacles they each perceive; this will feed into the PM and Senior Supplier's risk management approach and planning.
• Oracle TNSnames has been agreed by the project team as the initial exemplar candidate for configuration by the automated tools environment, and this has also been agreed with Technology Management (so the first milestone was met). It was agreed that progressive iterations may target additional examplar candidates as the work progresses, to demonstrate the capability of the tools both horizontal and vertically across real services.
• Initial environment is currently being built.
• PM holding bi-weekly meetings with Senior Supplier to focus on project risks, budget control, and quality of delivery.

Issues

The nature of the project presents challenges to ensure tight control of resources and granular representation of tasks within Asta. PM and Senior Supplier to address this and regularly review estimates against actual effort to reduce project risk.

Arranging meetings to include the wider project team and stakeholders is challenging and there have been some resource conflicts resulting in delays to meetings; the initial meetings have also been rushed due to diary commitments. PM has requested some flexibility and an acknowledgment that not everybody may be able to attend every meeting; however if this continues to be a problem, it may result in further delays to project milestones.

Next Steps

• Further reviews of plan and estimates.
• Further emphasis on project risks and strategies.