Overview

Background

This project will continue the decommissioning work of the last few years, and remove obsolete infrastructure from our environment to prevent the accumulation of such old kit which creates major difficulties for us when those systems are no longer supportable. We have often not been aware of some systems going out of support until very close to their de-support date.

By planning for an annual review of the end of life dates for servers and software, we can minimise the risk to systems and business areas by alerting them in advance to impending obsolescence allowing more time to plan for required upgrades or migrations.

Scope

This project is intended to build on the practices established in 2016/17 to ensure plans are in place each year to review and update the information collated about the service life of the current supported infrastructure. This project will continue to enhance and update the framework to ensure that our information is maintained and that work plans are arranged with business areas so that exit plans are prepared well in advance of de-support by vendors. It is intended that the information gathered by the project will inform the next round of annual planning for all relevant areas so that decommissioning, migration and replacement requirements for these are known in advance and can be addressed through the planning of future work for the affected programmes.

The project will also identify any hardware or applications that need to be decommissioned or migrated in 18-19, and advise the appropriate programme management. Finally, while it is anticipated that no decommissioning work or migrations will be included in the scope of this project, it may become necessary to modify the scope at some point to pick up some tasks of this type. Any ad hoc decommissions will therefore be carried out as necessary by the appropriate teams in IS Applications.

Objectives and Deliverables

Benefits

1. The project will contribute to the delivery of a simplified infrastructure where more costly legacy services and technologies are diminished and rationalised. Legacy services are complex to manage and support and, by comparison to more contemporary equivalent technologies, offer poorer, more expensive, more time-consuming management and user experience.
2. Reducing the number of ways that the technical infrastructure needs to be managed (for example, patching) should improve efficiency and predictability. This, in turn, should achieve a better quality of service and deliver a more reliable business infrastructure.
3. An improved and 'cleaner' environment should provide an improved and less costly environment for our end-users.
4. The removal of obsolete technologies and software should also produce benefits through the need to discontinue training and knowledge or skills acquisition for these among IS Apps staff.
5. Better information for colleagues and business partners when they undertake annual planning so that they have a 'bigger picture' of what needs to be taken into consideration for planning.

Success Criteria

Overall, the success of this project can be measured by the information on equipment and programs that are approaching end of life that it provides to stakeholders to inform their project planning in the next round of 3 year planning. 

Particular measures will be the delivery of updated technology lifecycle documentation (that can be used for annual review), and, moving forward, clear plans for any obsolete components and the communication of these plans, as well as appropriate advice for any other areas running a risk of 'technical debt'. 

Project Milestones