Report for February 2017

Report Date

February 2017

Achievements this period

• Development Iterations 1 and 2 were completed - including the development of EASE login, user management and programme data management
• The developments have been demonstrated to the product owner who provided positive feedback

Issues

1. Project stage estimates were exceeded by 13d in Foundations Stage and 7d in Development Iteration 1, resulting in a higher than planned burn rate.  The contributing factors were an extension to the Foundations stage to decide the optimum software development platform and related architecture; and a higher than expected level of effort in Iteration 1 to align developments with the Python web framework, Django.  The EUCLID views were also amended in Iteration 1 following feedback on the data from the product owner and user group, for example to include a school subject area item to support clustering of programmes.  The budget position has been flagged to the project sponsor and programme manager and presents a risk that the project has insufficient budget for a full fifth development iteration.  As a result, the project's cost RAG is showing as AMBER this month.
2. The velocity of development has not been sufficient to deliver all the user stories taken into the iteration plans for Iterations 1 and 2.   One of the software developers was absent with sickness for 3 days during Iteration 1, and the integration with EdGEL was more time consuming than expected but has now been completed.  The management of programme data had some complexities but has now been completed.  It is expected that the velocity of development will increase during the remaining iterations now that the technical building blocks have been established and with the stories geared towards the end user having been very well defined.
3. Inconsistency between 'school code' definitions in EUCLID and Central Auth; to resolve this, Student Systems are set update the EUCLID view to match such that it displays as level 4 in the University's organisation hierarchy
4. HSS015 will take 1 day of the lead developer's time as unplanned time during Iteration 3; this was agreed with the CAHSS IS Apps programme manager and should not have a significant impact on HSS014.

Two of the issues reported last month have been resolved, for reference these were:

1. Role of school administrator in system is not clear; this has been clarified that the core system administration role will be solely at college level

2. No resources/approach agreed yet for development of new BI universe; following a meeting with the project sponsor, the BI Universe. development has been de-scoped in favour of making the data compatible with Power BI Gateway; a meeting is planned with Production Management and the CAHSS BI Team Manager to confirm the approach is feasible and agree next steps.

Next steps

• Development Iteration 3: Mar 7th - Mar 20th
• Development Iteration 4: Mar 21st - Apr 3rd
• Sharing the test system with the user group
• Meeting to discuss Power BI, as previously noted
• Planning for Iteration 5 (where feasible within the budget constraints) and planning around the lead developer's annual leave in early April