Completion Report

Project Summary:

The stated objectives for this project were:

In the project brief, the following deliverables were identified:

A majority of the obectives and deliverables have been achieved. One major change was that the original scope of this project was modified to include not simply the purchase of and recommendations for the LIVE servers, but also the build and delivery of these. This change was effected under issue 6 in February 2016 and the LIVE servers are now in service. The one objective that was not fully met was the training of IS Apps staff in the use and management of Oracle 12c. Some colleagues have undertaken appropriate training, and some others have attended introductory sessions, but not everyone who needed training has yet been able to do so.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 120 days

Staff Usage Actual: 146 days

Staff Usage Variance: 22%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Extended duration

This project has encountered several delays, with the original suggestion for deployment of DEV and TEST in February being moved out and eventually achieved in late May. The reasons for this are explained below, and there has also been a subsequent delay to the deployment sign-off. This is also explained below.

The original plan for the project was completed in September, and the various tasks were expected then to be complete by February. This plan had to be modified at the end of October when it was announced that the main person who had been working on the project was due to leave the University at short notice. This meant that the work had to be re-assigned and it was thought that it could be shared across several colleagues in the Development Technology team so that the new knowledge could be acquired through the team. However, the revised plan based on this model was not accepted by WIS and it was suggested that the project be assigned to a contractor who could work more or less exclusively on it.

The outstanding milestones were therefore planned out again in January, with the recruitment of a contractor complete, and work on the project got under way again. There was another delay in March/April through a combination of some build tasks taking longer than originally estimated, and problems with the second TEST server which led to some restorative work needing to be carried out on that server by ITI Unix staff. The outstanding milestones were replanned again in early April, and these were adhered to apart from the final deployment sign-off, which was planned for mid-June but was subsequently delayed because of leave commitments meaning that the handover workshops had to be rerun, and some outstanding tasks were awaiting resolution.

The extended duration of some stages of the project did put follow-on projects - that needed the different Oracle 12c environments to be ready for migration - at risk, but the deadlines for these were eventually met with the wiki database migrating for COM026.

Additional effort

The original estimate for the project was 120 days, but the final figure is 146 days overall. There have been two PICCLS for additional effort - one for 8 days in February (issue 7) and one for another 15 days in April (issue 9). These obviously brought the final approved total to 143 days, and an extra 3 days have been used across meetings and completing some tasks on handover and documentation.

The main differences between estimates and actual figures can be explained as follows:

• Project Management - this has risen as a natural consequence of the extended duration of the project.
• QA/Meetings - this has increased because of similar reasons to those listed above.
• Planning - there were several iterations of the three-point estimates prepared for the project brief, and a change of approach at the planning stage, all of which increased the effort used for this stage.
• Systems Analysis and Build - the increased effort for this stage was needed for the analysis and documentation of the new features of Oracle 12c and how they would best fit our infrastructure and network. There was also a degree of 'doubling' of effort with the change in project personnel after the original technical lead left the University and some tasks had to be restarted.
• Build of LIVE - the additional effort on this stage is attributable to the scope change that saw work on the LIVE environment widen out from the procurement of the LIVE servers to the build and deployment of these servers.
• Training - this element of the project was unused, in the end, apart from two members of the project team attending a one-day Oracle workshop that served as an introduction to Oracle 12c. It had been intended to run an in-house training course for the project team, but no provider could be pinned down and the original idea gradually slipped from the project scope. Colleagues in Technology Management have attended relevant training, but not under this project.

Key Learning Points:

This project eventually benefited from the recruitment of a contractor who could concentrate on this project, whereas the project had struggled a bit when there had been attempts to get the analysis and build work done alongside other project and support commitments. While this meant that the project eventually established an Oracle 12c service, feedback for the completion report has stated that the co-involvement of project team members has not been ideal because of the availability of Dev Tech & Tech Man colleagues: "hands on experience and testing/familiarity of procedures is required to build up our experience to the level of Alex who has been the main resource on the project. Ideally we would be using procedures in earnest before he leaves. Gordon has carried out some steps and the workshop should help towards this."

This is an important point about how much colleagues need to learn about new versions of technologies, and how we will use them, and is linked to the availability of colleagues to undertake learning 'on the job' during a period when time to do this has been limited. This underlines the fact that a training course was not eventually sourced for the project team and highlights how important training is within the division.  

Outstanding issues:

At the time of preparing this report, there are no outstanding issues.