Completion Report
Project Summary:
This project progressed the work required to ensure the University met its legislative obligations for applying any Tax, pension auto-enrolment or other annual compliance updates for Oracle HR & Payroll. (This is a standard recurring event (although not multi-year) to meet HM Revenue & Customs requirements. There is a significant IS and Partner input, to ensure the HRMS application has been updated to the appropriate legislative status, and to complete the actual Tax Year End. Normally including the appropriate Family Pack, Tax Year End Changes and Budget changes.)
This year pre-requisite patches were required along with the family pack in February. Following that Tax Year End changes were delivered in late March.
Since then the Direct Earnings Attachment patches have been investigated by Oracle who released 2 patches in order to solve the Patch and HR Global issue. (The DEA 1 and DEA 2 to follow through the Dev, Test and Live route.) The impact is that the business have had to complete manual works around in order to meet the monthly Payroll deadline since April.
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 145 days
Staff Usage Actual: 180 days
Staff Usage Variance: 24%
Other Resource Estimate: 0 days
Other Resource Actual: 0 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
The Project Budget
The proposal was planned for 100 days, however once the Brief had been competed the work had been estimate at 148 days, Since that time there were a further 2 increases approved
Since the last approved budget increase additional effort was required to resolve issues with the Mandatory Direct Earnings patches (of which Oracle released 2 seperate patches) and to include a clone to resolve an issue in TEST and to increase confidence for success of the LIVE deployment. The patches were applied to LIVE on 7th July and the Full Payment Submission, payroll process and new Direct Earnings process was followed succesfully - all submissions made to HMRC for the June payroll were accepted on 9th July and therefore closure approved. The increase in effort of 12 days was not PICCL'd as this remained in project tolerance.
Milestone Changes
A number of milestones were withdrawn during this project
- PICCL 9 (26 Feb) Phase 2 Dev Patching Complete and Signed off
- PICCL 16 (6 May) where all the Phase 3 milestones were removed due to no longer being required
Release of the P2 patches was delayed by Oracle from 6 Feb, to 18th Feb to 28th Feb. This significantly reduced the amount of time available to the project for contingency;
- In addition patches to DEV in Feb resulted in problems and a DEV clone was later planned - the P2 Dev Milestone was withdrawn as the decision was made by the project team to progress the patch to TEST so to not delay the patching process further.
- This left an extremely short time to meet Tax Year End.
- Meanwhile the Real Time Information (RTI) within project HRS079 required a clone to test, which also reduced the time available for TYE.
TYE patches were deployed to LIVE over 19-20th March.
Direct Earnings Attachment Changes (patch) involved manual workarounds for April, May and June payrolls, however the expectation is that Oracle will have resolved this for July Payroll. Oracle have released 2 scripts for us to use to get over the errors.
Key Learning Points:
A number of key learning points have been noted
- When raising an Oracle Service Request (SR) we should ALWAYS include all 'patch logs' as this will enable Oracle to respond faster without automatically asking us for this information.
- when planning work for the next annual maintenance project include planned, regular clones so that they do not get so out of date.
- Previously only one clone per environment has been planned which was nopt an issue prior to the introduction of Real time information submission to HMRC. As this process requires monthly balance processes to be completed in payroll the closer representation the data is to LIVE for the end of year testing in March the better.
- Consider estimating for 2 clones as standard in next year's annual maintenance project. One at the start of the project and 1 either mid way or at the end.
- Clones in general for HR should be discussed and agreed at programme level. What are the requirements of clones - specifically configuration clones or data clone? Are regular clones required outwith the project lifecycle?
- Consider forming a mailing list for this project, so that when emails are sent out, they are consistently sent to the correct people.
- This year's project had a lot of changes in staff, particularly with our partners. A list will add clarity to distribution of news
- More frequent meetings or conference calls are required at critical points in the project, if not required they can be cancelled with agreement from the project team.
Although meetings have been held at Acceptance for each phase, maybe now with all the project changes we should re-consider if more meetings are required
As a minimum, there should be pre-LIVE patching meetings or conference calls to agree the plan for the day(s) and to confirm that all parties involved understand the expected tasks, responsibilities and comms.
The whole year end project needs to be planned and understood, inc business processes/testing, so that there is clarity and agreement of all work and responsibilities and that they are defined. This has been agreed at programme level and a shared calander feature is being investigated to identify critical business and technical milestones/tasks.
Outstanding issues: