Report for September 2016

Report Date

September 2016

Achievements in Last Period

• Stages 2 & 3 were completed in TEST
• TEST BI was signed off by HR Systems
• Final Business Readiness work was completed by HR Systems
• Stages 1,2 and 3 were completed in LIVE - the final upgrade work on the eRecruitment Service was completed by Saturday, 24 September ahead of the Go LIVE date of 9am on Monday, 26th September. The effort required to complete the technical aspects of the LIVE upgrade was substantial and was only possible within 2 days of downtime to users due to the willingness of the technical team members, both UoE and supplier staff, to work a significant amount of out of hours in addition to their normal working pattern.
• LIVE BI upgrade in progress.

Issues

• Alternative method to put Holding pages into MyEd had to be developed at short notice as Special CAB did not approve the planned approach taking place in the prior to Sept 26th.
• Multiple JIRAs were raised in Stages 2& 3 in TEST that required significant overtime to resolve to keep the Go LIVE on track. Given the TEST environment had been fiully tested and signed off, this was not anticipated. A lack of clarity from the supplier regarding aspects of their upgrade process caused some of the additional work and testing. This was the first time the project had to complete stage 2 and 3 from the upgrade process so a level of issue resolution was likely to take place but some could have been avoided with more complete information.
• Stages 2 and 3 on LIVE went well thanks to the maintenance of the detailed Build Record for LIVE by the technical architect, ensuring that all the lessons were learned the work on TEST.
• Quo Vadis, a third party ocsp certificate checking supplier had a very unfortunately timed unplanned outage on Monday, 26th September in the At Risk period for the upgraded .eRecruitment service. This meant that although eRecruitment was available for users, when using the Quickjump functionality to the Back Office, the java check was failing. This could not have been predicted and there was nothing the University could do to resolve this issue other than inform Quo Vadis that it needed resolved. It was fixed in the evening of September 26 and full service was restored to users on Tuesday, 27th September.
• Multiple JIRAs have been raised since the upgraded version went live. Some of these JIRAs relate to issues that were tested and resolved in DEV an TEST and therefore should not be happening in the LIVE application. Others were not experienced in DEV and TEST and the team is working to resolve why they are happening in LIVE.
• The LIVE BI upgrade has required more work than expected given the TEST BI service had been tested and signed off by HR Systems.
• Given the issues noted above, the project is at risk of not being able to achieve its Deployment Sign off milestone which may also impact on the Closure milestone (as noted in Risk 1). This means the Time RAG Status is being set to AMBER. With no remaining contingency, there is a risk that the Cost of the project may exceed its budget of 158 days but this is likely to be within 10% overall.

Next Steps

• Resolve remaining JIRAs
• Complete Closure process

Milestones