Plan
Priority and Funding
Funded Directly Funded from Marketing
Impact and Dependencies
The prospectuses are the most visible recruitment activity of the university with 13.1 million views in 2012. As the infrastructure is currently unsupported these high profile systems are at significant risk of failure. Moreover, they do not meet business requirements.
Background
The current systems for the Undergraduate (UG) and Postgraduate (PG) prospectus have remained static and undeveloped for a number of years. Consequently basic information has either been added in an ad-hoc fashion (e.g. html in a single field) or omitted entirely. The systems are no longer fit for purpose and are out of step with competitor activity.
If this project is not undertaken there are a number of risks the University must accept:
This project delivers a number of essential enahncements to the applcations used for the publishing of UG and PG prospectus.
The enhancements to UG will only take place once UG Prospectus Application has been ported over to the new infrastructure and signed-off. The enhancements to PG will only take place once PG Prospectus Application has been ported over to the new infrastructure and signed-off.
Note that the first task is to review and restate the requirements - the original list of the proposal was no longer be the current priorities for the business.
Work/Task Breakdown
The following steps will be followed for each improvement:
1. Identify improvement
2. Document requirements with the business, to include business and system changes. Record in JIRA.
3. Produce a prioritised list of system changes with estimates. Record in JIRA.
4. Define iteration/release cycle
5. Define and prepare training requirements where required
Background
The Student Systems Board wants to provide resources to be focussed on continuous improvements to ensure that enhancements and small changes can be made to existing systems and processes to have an impact on the student experience. This project has been set up for this. This work will be driven by the users of our systems, feedback from support and project implementations and technical enhancements. In selecting the improvements, the same decision making principles and criteria as used for the rest of the Student Systems Roadmap will be followed:
Priority and Funding
This project is Discretionary. Funding of up to 350 IS days have been identified to deliver prioritised improvements. In some cases, the scale of the improvement may become an in-year project with days coming from this allocation.
Impact and Dependencies
The improvements within this project should be independent, although there is the potential for an improvement to impact or be dependent on other projects. These impacts/dependencies will be documented with the requirements for the improvement.
Scope
The scope of this project is to upgrade the TEST and LIVE Perspective environments to version 4.6. This will involve a major release upgrade and will also require the intervening releases applied.
Exclusions:
- There will be no software development required
- Fixing any any pre-existing issues with the system
- There is no requirement to use or configure the mobile application option
- Any upgrades to the SQL Server instance
- Any integration with EASE or any other systems
Assumptions:
Priority and Funding
This project has been defined as Priority 2.
This project is funded by Estates and Buildings and is a Discretionary Project.
Impact and Dependencies
The Perspective system is in constant use so the downtime and risk to the system resulting from the upgrades, while unavoiable, will need to be managed through communication, ensuring that adequate notice is given to the users to limit the impact on operational activities.
Work/Task Breakdown
Planning
- Confirm project brief with the project sponsor and project team
- Complete project estimate
- Prepare project plan
- Sign-off planning phase
Systems Design
- Clarification on current system configuration
- Review and consolidate upgrade instructions
- Update Technical Architecture Document (TAD)