Completion Report

Project Summary:

The key objectives of this project were to:

• Migrate all of the listed financial applications onto a supported version of Coldfusion before the end-of-life in July 2016
• Implement automated deployment for all of the listed financial applications as part of the migration

The project successfully delivered on both of the key objectives while achieving a budget saving of 9 days against the original estimate. 

Whilst a number challenges were encountered during the project, particularly in relation to resource conflicts and dependencies on non-Finance applications, an excellent team effort across Finance and IS Applications resulted in a successful outcome.  The team were happy with the way this project was managed.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 172 days

Staff Usage Actual: 177 days

Staff Usage Variance: 3%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Project completed in 177 days of efffort compared to revised budget of 172 days.  A few additional days were required towards the end of the project to complete some outstanding technical and support documentation.

However, the original project budget was 186 days so a saving of 9 days has been achieved.

Key Learning Points:

Mike McMonagle has sourced feedback for each of the projects which has delivered ColdFusion upgrades so this section should be read in conjunction with any wider lessons learnt captured by Mike.

From this project's perspective, the key learning points were:

• Project organisation and commitment - having a consistent project team in place and attending weekly meetings was really beneficial to this project's success - thanks to all involved.
• Set-up of the ColdFusion 11 environments - a decision was taken to set up all the new environments (Dev, Test, Live) for each of the applications in advance of the deployments.  This had the benefit of everything being ready and in place (as per Agile).  When we came to implement fixes there was initially some inconsistency in fixes applied to Test and Live, so this is something to be considered for future projects.  Having detailed documentation behind this will help.  A set-up task required from ITI for the first two migrations had to be chased and led to a delay but this was fully resolved for the remainder of the migrations.
• Resourcing - key person resources were required on ColdFusion upgrades for other projects, particularly in Software Development and Development Technology.  One of the Finance testing resources on occasion had to be pulled from other work at a busy time of year for Finance.  Perhaps a resource co-ordinator in Project Services to cover the programme of all ColdFusion migrations (not just for this project) would have been appropriate and would have saved Project Management effort and reduced conflicts for resources.  There were also conflicts for ITI Unix resources.  The team commented that having a single PM as point of contact for all Finance applications was beneficial.  Recognising that a number of issues or fixes had to be implemented post-Live deployment, more time was set aside for the later deployments to successfully manage this.
• Applying fixes found in Test environment to Live environment - a few issues resolved in Test were not applied to Live which resulted in some re-work following the deployment.  An example was the eIT Comments Tab. 
• Finance have business owners for each system who are notified to agree and sign off system downtime - a single point of contact is still preferable for the project with involvement from the business owner of the systems at the appropriate times, in this project we achieved this by email (where the Project Manager must ensure this happens in advance of publishing the service alert).

Outstanding issues:

None noted.