Closure Comments

   -----Original Message----- From: FINNAN Anne Sent: 23 October 2014 09:48 To: MATHISON Anne Subject: HRS079 - comments

 Hi Anne

 This project overlapped with HRS075 and the normal business functions which gave confusion, to me anyway, as to what was priority for the business. 

 Lesson Learned:

HR projects now has a business dairy of projects, support, business  work which is available to all parties.

Its has given a better understanding of working practices  between isapps and hr/payroll

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From:FLEMING Greg Sent: 10 October 2014 10:47 To: MATHISON Anne; BAILLIE Pam; MCLAREN Susan; SHAW Alyson; MCKENNA Gordon; CHAN John; NICHOLLS Dawn; FINNAN Anne Subject: RE: HRS079 RTI and AE minor Enhancements Project - feedback for closure please?

Hi Anne

DB Clones

Regular DB Clones are maybe not such a good idea unless it is necessary to bring the three environments into sync. There's a large time-management overhead to cloning and it makes assumptions about the availability of the prerequisite personnel.

Also, cloning is often destructive, tending as it does to wipe out work-in-progress, destroying logins and responsibilities in the application (which need to be reinstated), etc.

We've done a lot of work of late to ensure that all three environments are now in step and maintaining them that way should be less of an issue. Regular cloning for its own sake wouldn’t necessarily help with that.

Patching Generally

My view, as a developer, is that patching is essentially a support function and really only requires development input when we need to change a process to fit our 'non-standard' business requirement (e.g. P60). Then, development involvement is appropriate. Otherwise, patching is support.

Thanks

Greg Fleming

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-----Original Message----- From: SHAW Alyson Sent: 10 October 2014 09:21 To: MATHISON Anne Cc: HENDERSON Gillian; FLEMING Greg; CHAN John; MCKENNA Gordon; FINNAN Anne; NICHOLLS Dawn Subject: HRS079 closure

 Hi Anne

I've not much to say really on this one since it was mostly finished before it came back into this team. 

Couple of things from the lessons learned section though:

- Recommend that there is a project every year where days could be drawn from for non compliance patches, support or updates.

- This would be in addition to the annual maintenance project (It could be set up in a similar fashion to the finance minor enhancements project that could provide the days for this work that support are unable to cover. SACS also have a minor enhancements projects

I can see the idea behind this suggestion and in principle I think it's a good idea. However as usual I would have some caveats - namely, that these sort of ad-hoc ongoing 'support type' projects are very difficult to model properly in ASTA.  As you know, if you book someone for 2 days a month then it will spread that time out over the month. However in reality what happens is that they are needed 100% for 2 days and then not at all. This makes it a pain in the neck to monitor and the PMs of the other projects they are booked on have to understand that they might not get their full allocation in a given week.  Also - I think we would need to be careful about managing business expectations about what could be achieved under such a project. How do we monitor the different bits of work being done and not just end up with a free for all?  We need to remember I don't have that big a team even if I do spread the patching around between people.

- Consider Clones taking place more regularly to improve business testing.

- This is something that needs to be considered at a programme level and agreement reached as to the frequency

1) would it really improve business testing?

2) there is a considerable overhead to doing this

3) has to be very, very carefully scheduled as will be constantly overwriting work that is in flight if not careful.

It's a bit of a balancing act.

Alyson

From:STUART Nikki Sent: 19 August 2014 20:34 To: MATHISON Anne Cc: NICHOLLS Dawn Subject: HRS079 - RTI and AE Enhancement Closure comments

 Variance

Conflicts with Annual Maintenance 2013-14 (HRS075) resulted in RTI and AE Minor Enhancements project (HRS079) being planned over a longer duration

• At points during the project there was confusion with overlaps to the Annual Maintenance project (HRS075).
  • Maybe the compliance elements should have been added to the scope of the Annual Maintenance project for easier management of tasks

  • A consultants visit required by the RTI and AE Minor Enhancements project required project support

    • However the access requirements were not clarified ahead of time and this resulted in a small amount of effort that was duplicated as both Apps Man and CSG Dev were booked to provide support for the visit