Completion Report
Project Summary:
This project was initiated to identify and delivery improvements to specified reports in HR, Payroll and Pensions areas.
Project HRS077 started in 2014 with scope that has changed significantly over the passing years with multiple changes in project stakeholders as people left and joined the University. This project suffered from impacts from higher priority work both from IS and Finance.
Objectives
|
No. |
Objective from Project Brief |
Objectives Met (Yes / No) |
|---|---|---|
|
O1. |
To document current issues with reporting across HR, Payroll and Pensions |
Yes This was produced during the initial phases of the project. (see Business Requirements Document). |
|
O2. |
To consider a strategy for implementing improvements |
Yes The original approach was to utalise APEX reporting (see Item 3). Primarily this decision was driven by the fact that at that time delivery of Payroll & Pensions data via a BI universe was estimated at a large (c. 200d) project. This was later revisited as new options for BI development were available via the newer version of BI suite and the Payroll BI universe was added to the scope of the project (see Item 10) |
|
O3. |
Deliver improvements in priority order |
Partially As only the full requirements for the HR reports were provided during the initial analysis these were treated as a priority by default. As the project progressed and the new Payroll & Pensions Technical Support Manager post was created the payroll reporting became more prominent and the Payroll BI Universe was added to the scope of the project. (see Item 10). The decision was later made to remove the HR reports from the scope of the project and prioritise the Payroll BI Universe (see Item 30). Laterly the Payroll Bi Universe was amended to include additional fields to allow the HR reports to be delivered through the Payroll BI universe (see Item 42). |
|
O4. |
Catalogue the reports according to the standards set by Service Management |
Partially Payroll BI Universe meets Service Management user group security and universe folder naming conventions. |
Deliverables
| No. | Deliverable Description | Deliverable Met (Yes / No) |
|---|---|---|
| D1 | A report documenting current issues with reporting across HR, Payroll and Pensions | Yes |
| D2 | A detailed list of improvements in priority order | Partially |
| D3 | Improvements delivered to the existing reporting suite | Partially |
| D4 | An Asset catalogue for Service Management that lists the reports and their BI standard user information | Yes |
Analysis of Resource Usage & Variance:
Staff Usage Estimate: 120 days
Staff Usage Actual: 200 days
Staff Usage Variance: 67%
Other Resource Estimate: 0 days
Other Resource Actual: 0 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
The project took 2.5 years longer than originally planned to deliver. This is a significant extension and there are lessons to learn from this (see below) the reasons for the variance includes;
- Conflicts with technical, Project Management and business resources from higher priority project and other activities
- Issues with the technical delivery of the requirements
- Changes in both technical and business resources
- Changes to scope and lack of documented requirements
- Effort spent by a BI specialist that did not have a full understanding of the complexity of the payroll data structures.
Key Learning Points:
- Changes to Scope and lack of documented requirements
- The Payroll BI Universe was added to the scope of the project. This additional scope was not fully documented and therefore the impact of adding this work could not have been fully assessed. In this instance the decision to deliver the Payroll BI universe was correct to achieve the overall project benefits but the lack of documented requirements and clarity resulted in the project deliverables being redesigned through the project. Where a change of scope of any significant size is agreed the project should include a new milestone(s) to gather and agree the requirements and document and sign off the design. There should then be a later decision point around whether the change in scope should continue further once the full impact is understood.
- When the project changed direction from building Apex reports to creating a Business Objects Universe, a further iteration of the business requirements would have been useful in order to establish a more widely use-able set of definitions. As such the Universe is a straight reflection of the database, which will require guidance or renaming of objects before it can be widely used. Lack of documented requirements also resulted in the Universe being delivered without any measures. While this is not a major obstacle for Web Intelligence reports, it does prevent the use of other tools such as BI Explorer. Measures are being added under support calls in order to make the Universe more usable.
- A user testing plan should be produced at the analysis and design phase so that this can be used to influence the build decisions by better understanding the tests and likely scenarios that would occur in live and being able to use some of these tests for build verification. This should be a pre-requisite of entry to the build phase.
- Service Management and less frequent stakeholder engagement
- Service Management were involved at the start and points throughout the project but due to the length of the project the staff responsibilities and standard changed. This was not a significant issue but did impact the final stages of the project where discussions had to be revisited and standard conventions applied that should have been incorporated in to the build. For clarity on BI/MI specific standards this should be covered by the ongoing Digital Transformation work but generally where a project stakeholder is identified as "keep informed" or "contributor" rather than actively involved in the project there should be regular checkpoints agreed with the stakeholder(s) to ensure that any changes are inline with standards or current procedures.
- Complexity of the payroll data structures in eBusiness suite
- Unlike the HR data the payroll data tables in Oracle eBusiness suite are extremely complex and extracting and presenting data correctly requires an experienced developer. For this project this was evident in the increased effort required to produce the deliverables. This was evident during the production of the original payroll BI universe and again later when the BI specialist delivered a universe schema that would have worked for other data structures but resulted in duplicate errors and missing joins for the eBusiness suite data.
- Testing of Reporting functionality
- Testing of a BI universe is difficult and made even more so when the underlying data and reporting expectations are complex. The forthcoming BI/MI programme under the digital transformation portfolio should provide frameworks for this moving forward but as a minimum the project should agree a basic set of reports and scenarios that will be run to confirm that the universe can be signed off.
Outstanding issues:
A Payroll BI folder is to be set up under the existing ASTA time recording code to monitor the support effort this new functionality requires. This will be monitored and if this is significant then this will be discussed with Finance who understand that they may need to fund some additional support days.