Completion Report
Project Summary:
Did the Project meet is Objective and Scope?
The Objectives outlined in the Project Brief were;
Objective 1 Deliver System usability enhancement and Bug Fixes agreed as Phase 1b deliverables during the Implementation of eRecruitment by July 2013. | Was objective met? Yes, although live issues resulted in deployment sign off being delayed to November. |
Deliverable - System enhancements and bug fixes to meet agreed user requirements (Core and HR) Agreed Core changes documented in CCN005 (covering Phase 1b) were promoted to Live in July. However, following this a number of issues were identified. These had not been encountered during testing so the following actions have been agreed; - Prior to acceptance there should be an agreed period where no further rework is delivered and full end to end testing is undertaken to confirm readiness for Live. - restrict Core access to “on request” for TEST and LIVE to reduce the risk that changes are made to Live and not Test One Free of charge cosmetic change, Alignment of Employment History Screens, was agreed by the Board to be postponed to Phase 2. This was request by Core as this will be covered by a standard product change in v19. The majority of Live issues were resolved within the first few weeks by either configuration changes or minor updates, however, there were some persistent issues that required additional development or the support teams were unable to progress without project team input. Therefore, in addition to the above, handover to Core support teams will take place earlier so they already have the knowledge required to support bespoke changes. | |
Deliverable - Updated Successful Applicant Interface (IS Apps) This work was split in to two deliverables to allow the changes related to the Core updates to be delivered at the same time and to also incorporate required HESA changes. The further Phase 1b updates were delivered later in July. | |
Deliverable - Revised system documentation All relevant User Guidance and IS Applications support documentation was updated are required to reflect the Phase 1b changes. | |
Objective 2 Implement the BOXI Universe which was delivered to TEST during Phase 1 of the project | Was objective met? Yes |
Deliverable - BOXI Universe to be deployed to LIVE
The BOXI universe was promoted to Live as required. However, the Universe is complex and requires a good understanding of the underlying data. It has therefore been agreed that the Universe will not be rolled out to allow users to create their own reports and standard reports will be published. This will be standard practice across the University following the BOXI upgrade so this decision to limit the eRecruitment Universe to standard reports does not negatively impact users. | |
Objective 3 Replace the PDF Generation software with Core’s chosen product | Was objective met? Yes |
Deliverable - PDF Software replacement
There were intermittent issues encountered in LIVE and Core delivered a new PDF screen to allow this element to be signed off. The new screen allows users choose an alternative process to generate the PDFs should the standard approach fail. No issues have been reported with the new screen functionality. | |
Objective 4 Consolidation of DEV and TEST URLs | Was objective met? No |
Deliverable - Updated DEV and TEST URLs that are in line with those for LIVE (i.e. www.vacancies.ed.ac.uk)
ITI were unable to commit to the update of the URLs at the same time as the clone work due to the pressures of the start of term. This deliverable was de-scoped from this project and will be carried forward to Phase 2. This was an IS housekeeping task and does not impact on functionality of IS Apps ability to support the service. | |
Objective 5 Decommission Old Jobs Application | Was objective met? Yes |
Deliverable - decommissioned existing PDF servers and Jobs Application The PDF virtual servers were decommissioned in July following the LIVE implementation of the permanent PDF solution. The Jobs application was decommissioned in December. It was agreed that the old Jobs database would be retained until December 2014 for reporting purposes. | |
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 104 days
Staff Usage Actual: 110 days
Staff Usage Variance: 6%
Other Resource Estimate: days
Other Resource Actual: days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
The project was hit by significant issues post LIVE relating to the Core deliverables. This delayed the deployment sign off for by 4 months and added an additional 27 days to the IS Applications estimate (21 days of these days were taken from the contingency budget). There was also additional costs approved by the Board through the need to deliver additional Core changes for the Internal applicant workflow.
The Core estimates and actuals for the project were;
Phase 1b Project Effort – Core
| Planned Effort | Actual Effort to 15th November | Estimated Effort to Complete | Variance |
Development | 24.85 days | 24.85 days | 0 days | 0 days |
Dev. Contingency | 5 days | 5 days | 0 days~ | 0 days |
Implementation | 69 days | 67 days* | 0 days | - 2 days |
Total | 98.85 days | 96.85 days | 0 days | - 2 days |
· * as highlighted at the Project Board of 31st July Core have confirmed that they will not bill for 3.5 days effort linked to post deployment issues.
Key Learning Points:
- The project was originally scoped as a simple enhancements project but had to also incorporate an upgrade of the eRecruitment software to v18. The enhancements were delivered within weeks of the software being upgraded and HR did not have the resources to fully test both the upgrade and enhancements separately. For similar projects it is recommended that any upgrade is fully tested and signed off before delivery of any enhancements so to separate the changes.
- Software changes/bug fixes were delivered right up to the acceptance sign off. This meant that there was a limited period to complete full end to end re-testing before acceptance sign off. Where possible a minimum of a week should be planned to ensure that the final product to be deployed to LIVE has been satisfactorily retested before acceptance sign off is agreed. This would also allow for greater confidence and understanding of what will be deployed. If required, consideration should be made as to whether any changes should be postponed and deployed at a slightly later date rather than delivering changes that have been rushed.
- A sub group of the User Group was set up to review all communications that were sent to end Users. This was seen as a positive move from the User Group and also ensured that the communications from the project team provided the information needed by end users.
- This project was required to make changes to the Successful applicant interface within the same timescales that interface changes were required for the HESA project. The impact and dependencies of these two pieces of work should have been reviewed to determine whether the best course of action would have been to move all interface updates to a single project.
- The BOXI Universe was delivered to mirror the same data structure of the Core database. The Core database is complex and some feilds appear to be duplicated as they hold a historical record of the data entered at the staff request stage, for example. This has meant that HR took the decision to not roll the Universe out to users to create their own BOXI reports. This will be standard practice across the University following the BOXI upgrade so this decision to limit the eRecruitment Universe to standard reports does not negatively impact users. However, BOXI universes are an important deliverable of a project and careful consideration and effort needs to be applied to deliver a reporting tool that meets the users needs.
- The Change Control process was not sufficient for the scale of changes contraced to third party suppliers. This project reviewed the documentation and change request process that was in place and enhanced the documentation along with formalising the change request process.
Outstanding issues:
Two outstanding actions are being handed over to support to close;
SLA between UoE and Core
It was agreed that all existing information relating to the service level agreements, contained in the contract or agreed via email, should be collated and drafted in to a formal Service Level Agreement document. This document will include key contacts, the process for requesting, agreeing and progressing support enhancements and the response times expected for support calls. The data required for the SLA will be discussed and agreed during the forthcoming support review meetings and is to be collated by end January.
Speed of the Development and Test Environments
It was noted after the clone work that the performance on the Development and Test environments was slower than was deemed acceptable. The Core and IS Applications support teams are progressing this issue with some indexing already applied to improve the response of some functionality.