Completion Report

Project Summary:

The original objectives and deliverables for this project were:

Objectives:

• Create TEST environment that replicates the performance, resilience and availability of LIVE environment
• Create TRAINING environment that reflects functionality of LIVE environment
• Ensure that the creation of these new environments does not negatively impact the performance of LIVE environment
• Agree benchmarking metrics

Deliverables:

• Revised service and architecture documentation, with additional process detail on complicated elements such as the failover process, webconfig usage, SQL backups etc
• Agreed metrics to measure and benchmark service performance before project start, for use in performance evaluation throughout project eg. CPU & RAM load, failover timings etc
• TEST and TRAINING environments fit for purpose that do not impact LIVE

Each of the above have been achieved with the application deployed into LIVE in June and TEST in September 2012.

The project sponsor and stakeholders have agreed that the project can now be signed off and closed.

Analysis of Resource Usage

Staff Usage Estimate:  39 days

Staff Usage Actual:       89 days

Staff Usage Variance:  +128%  

Explanation for variance:

The project was initially planned to refresh the test infrastructure with new hardware.  A decision was taken to instead refresh Live and cascade the hardware to Test.  This significant scope change effectively doubled the work of the initial estimate.  In addition Testing was of greater duration than anticipated due to the complexity of systems interfaces which required additional resource from several developers of disparate services. This extended the acceptance stage in both Test and Live by several weeks due to the increased resource required and difficuties in obtaining unexpected resource.  Both Test and Live encountered different issues.

The scope changes and subsequent changes to the resource estimates were recorded in the project issue and chage control log:

http://old.projects.ed.ac.uk/areas/accom/general/ACS027/PICCL.shtml

Item 13: Increase from 39 to 64 days during the design stage re-estimate.

Item 19: Increase from 64 to 74 days during the release stage.

Item 24: Increase from 74 to 83 days - additional resources required during the go live.

Final increase to 89 days which was approved by the Sponsor.

Key Learning Points:

Both IS Apps and Kinetics had their own implementation plans.  It was felt that these plan could have been shared more appropriately in order to ensure the implementation was done as smoothly as possible.  Note that Dev Tech and AS are currently investigating this further, using specific examples, to understand how improvements can be made.

Outstanding issues:

• Significant database growth: Technology Management have action to monitor size of log files.
• Software/file versioning: There is a lack of process regarding the responsibilities for the update and recording of the failover scripts.  Discussion regarding the implementation of software versioning are currently ongoing between PM, Applications Management and supplier.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 39 days

Staff Usage Actual: 89 days

Staff Usage Variance: 128%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Key Learning Points:

Outstanding issues: