Completion Report

Project Summary:

The implementations of the Real Time Information (RTI) and Autoenrolement (AE) HMRC processes have introduced a high volume of manual effort each month for payroll and pensions to resolve historical data errors or to manually include statutory payments. To ensure that the year end process can be submitted without errors configuration changes were needed. Much of this work has been progressed by Payroll and the FIS Systems Support Manager but this project provided support from IS Apps completing tasks that either required database access or benefited from automation, i.e. bulk updates. 

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 30 days

Staff Usage Actual: 56 days

Staff Usage Variance: 87%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

A number of reasons for the variance can be found below, which impacted time, budget and estimate

•  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
  • However the AE and RTI changes elapsed time continued well after the Annual Maintenance project was complete, so in future the business diary will be made available to the relevant projects (see lessons learned)

• 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

• There were a set of patches planned for 4th September, which originally covered AE and RTI patches however during testing the RTI patch did not work.

  • The decision was made to proceed with the signed off AE Patch and to progress the RTI work separately

  • The RTI patch was raised with Oracle and once the fix had been developed and implemented here through the usual environments it proceeded to Live on October 2nd

  • Another complication with this work was accommodating the HRS081 Migrate Oracle HR & Payroll Database to new Infrastructure project. However the patching they required also successfully took place on October 2nd.

Key Learning Points:

The key learning points that became evident during the project include:

• Where an external consultant is booked for the project clarify before hand and agree the consultant's access requirements

• Refer to the SASG/SITS Programme Managers to hear how they regularly carry out patches and updates with resources planned on a monthly/quarterly basis and then only use what is required (although consideration must also be given as to how the resources are booked and how the work is managed along with other in progress projects bookings. This is in addition to managing the business expectations)

• The HR/Payroll and Pensions business diary will now include all the relevant project implementations for each environment. This provides a better understanding of working practices  between IS Apps, HR, + Payroll and Pensions

 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

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
• Each time a clone is planned: project progress delays, environment availability and an increase to the project budget
• Any time a clone is planned in Dev and / or Test, the project must take account of the impact the clone refresh will have on other projects work and data.

Outstanding issues:

No outstanding issues.