Completion Report

Project Summary:

 Contributors

Deliverables, Scope and Objectives 

Paul Cruickshank noted that Estates had originally wanted this project to include updates from Finance (advanced transaction report) being sent nightly back to Estates and incorporated into the Estates database. None of the project managers attending the meeting, or other project team members could recall this requirement and it has not been included in an the BRD, nor recorded as having been dropped from scope at any point in the project. Therefore only income and not expenditure is included. Deliverable D1 may refer to this.

All recorded deliverables recorded in the BRD were achieved.

Schedule

This project remained on schedule until July 2011, The project was then subject to several severe delays:

1. Project EST060 did not deliver the property and lease module till February 2012. This project depended upon EST060 and so could not proceed into the acceptance phase until then.
2. Once UAT began, the main issues encountered were to do with the physical printing of invoices, as controlled by Efinancials software supplied by external supplier ABS. These issues took several months to resolve, preventing the project from proceeding to the delivery phase. The risk associated with printing invoices in Finance was not identified by the project before UAT began.
3. The continued delay in the delivery of this project meant that the Archibus upgrade (EST069) came to have an impact on this project. The new version of Archibus was deployed to TEST and this project undertook UAT with version 19 of Archibus. EST069 then could not complete due to issues which the external supplier, MASS, took many weeks to resolve. AS EST065 had been tested against version 19, and LIVE remained on version 17, this project could not deploy to LIVE until EST069 completed. In addition, a table change introduced to EBIS by EST069 caused an issue with EST065 which caused additional effort for this project to resolve.

Lessons learned

Successes

1. No post-deployment issues encountered, demonstrating robust and thorough user acceptance testing by Liz Torrance, Donna Archibald and Anne Finnan
2. UAT resulted in very  few changes having to be made to IS apps code demonstrating quality work from developer Stella MacKinnon. developer Mike McMonagle, who picked up project during UAT produced required fixes efficiently.
3. Business owner was able to provide thorough understanding of business requirements.
4. Introduction of JIRA was very valuable to the progress of the project.

Areas for Improvement

1. Developer should be involved as early as possible during development of business requirements.
2. Developers would benefit from a better understanding of practical business processes.
3. Reliance on a single tester (In both Estates and Finance) presents a risk to project progress and can ( and did) introduce delays.
4.  Opinions in the meeting differed on whether EST060 and ESt065 should have been one, two or three projects. Adding scope to existing projects should be scrutinised very carefully in the future and particularly where external suppliers are involved. The risks of delays to one part of a project and its effect on remaining parts should be carefully considered. Although the reasons for attaching the property and lease module to EST060 ( originally a webcentral upgrade, not adding new features) and then establishing a separate project (EST065) to realise the benefits of the property and lease module may have made sense at the time, there was a lot of confusion and morale-sapping delay introduced by these decisions, as project team  members were frequently faced with weeks without progress. additionally, code for EST065 had to be developed before the property and lease module was delivered.
5. Future projects should carefully estimate the time required for robust user testing, especially if an external supplier is involved. Business areas should consider seconding staff to carry out testing and should resource staff accordingly.
6. An extended period of  user acceptance testing makes it hard to ensure that IS applications development resources can be made available when needed.
7. It is an advantage to carry out testing over a concentrated period and getting testers and developers into the same room at the same time, if possible, can be very helpful.
8. if a project is subject to delays and periods of inactivity there is a danger that  the quality of communication between members deteriorates and project manager should bear this in mind.

Benefits delivered.

1. Estates will save on average 2 days per month of staff time, although as the costs of this project ( not just in IS applications time) reduce this benefit in the short term.
2. IS applications and Estates and Buildings and Finance staff now have experience of working together which should benefit future projects.
3.  

Resource breakdown by Team:

No outstanding issues

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 116 days

Staff Usage Actual: 140 days

Staff Usage Variance: 21%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

1. Extended duration of project increased PM time in particular because of extra  requirements for resourcing, meetings and reporting, but also increased general team effort required for quality assurance.
2. Additional work required, particularly by Applications Management, to solve printing issues which involved liaising with ABS, whose software was the cause of the printing issues.
3. Extra work required by development team to solve issues introduced by Archibus upgrade and need to force blank lines into printed invoices.

Key Learning Points:

Outstanding issues:

None.