Completion Report

Project Summary:

The HESA Staff Return is an annual submission of staff data which are required to meet HESA requirements. This project covers any changes required to collect the data in Oracle HR & Payroll and then submit the data to HESA.

HESA made substantial changes to the data requirements and the submission format for the 12/13 HESA staff return. The indication from HESA was that only minimal changes were required for the 13/14 return

The HR HESA project adopted an iterative implementation approach moving to LIVE iteratively as soon as possible.

• Initially it followed the traditional waterfall approach until the first LIVE install
• Thereafter further iterations to LIVE enabled proper thorough testing on LIVE data. This resulted in minimal testing in DEV and TEST to ensure that the application did not break before moving to LIVE

 Deliverables

• To review the necessary carried over work from the 12/13 return to determine if the code requires updated for 13/14 return
• Provide supporting changes to HR database, application, and extracts, if required
• Provide supporting changes to HESA and HESA Archive database, application, extracts, and BOXI universes, if required
• Update REF Staff
  • there is a standard process. We must make sure we return last year's data in the new fields that are available for this year only
• APEX - There was a change required on the APEX system created in 12/13 for HESA. When the issue was encountered it resulted in a person being both typical and atypical in the same year - thus resulting in the same assignment qualifying for inclusion in the HESA return under two different categories in the same year. This should be reviewed to confirm if this situation needs to be coded or can be manually handled.

All these deliverables have been met by this year's HR HESA project

Dev Tech worked to cover any implementations well together. Two Dev Tech resources generally completed the work and when one was not available the other was. The small resource booking worked well for this project as when one person had a large task they could usually fit the the small resource time required with little notice for HRS082.

No negatives came up with this project HR and CSG Dev/SASG were able to accommodate this project, which had a lot less work involved that the 2012-13 project and the known work we began with had been carried forward from last year's project.

The HR HESA return was committed on 15-Oct and the project can now be closed. HR have some queries to provide explanations to HESA by mid November, but no IS work is involved in this and the HR Business Systems Manager and the Project Sponsor have given approval for this project to Close.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 60 days

Staff Usage Actual: 89 days

Staff Usage Variance: 48%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Estimates

• New HESA requirements were received in May
• Build work completed sooner, which allowed the project to reduce in June
• Additional work was required for a number of more complicated JIRAs being tested in July
• The estimate changes details can be found in the PICCL Log, numbers 3, 6 and 7 (where  the revised budget changed from 60 to 88 days)

Milestones

• Revised Milestone dates for June and July were detailed in the PICCL Log, number 5, where although this delayed the dates the HESA submissions was still able to be met. This 2 week delay was mainly due to changes detailed above.

Key Learning Points:

To consider where work is being carried forward to next year's project to see if it could in future be handled in the current project before the return was submitted. This would, however, delay the submission of the return.

It is important to consider in advance any TEST system refreshes that are essential for a project - e.g. HESA return must have an updated TEST environment in late March each year

Outstanding issues:

There are a small number of JIRAs that require to be carried over to next year's project. Scripts were required to change 2 HR data fields for HRS082 covering an amount of data that was too large to be handled manually.  This was handled successfully by 2 data scripts and allowed HR to continue with their work progressing to completing the HESA Return.

The JIRAs include:

• HRS082-41 HESA_TERMS function (HRS082-41 data was handled manually by HR and will require to be coded for next year's return
• HRS082-46  DATEFHEI field (This was handled via a script to correct a number of data items for this field)
• HRS082-47 ACEMPFUN field  (This was handled via a script to correct a number of data items for this field)
• In addition the REFUA2014 field that was added for the 2013-14 return will be removed as it will no longer be required for 2014-15 onwards