Overview

Background  

With the transition of IT personnel from MVM to IS, existing services provided by the LTS IT team need to be reviewed to ensure required services are maintained and there are the necessary resources in place.

This project is to move the services currently provided by MVM LTS ITS Services, hosted on servers in George Square and Little France, onto IS IT Infrastructure, and to establish support for the eLearning team to be taken on by appropriate teams within IS.

The customer-facing parts of the MVM LTS Service Portfolio is made up of over 20 servers, hosting over 200 applications or significant (and sometimes complex) functional components, and over 150 databases underpinning many of these.

The user communities include the LTS eLearning development team, all their business customers and thousands of end users.

Their business customers are not exclusively UoE; some are national higher education, some are with partner institutions (e.g. Royal College of Surgeons, Lothian Health Board, … and there are business owners in several various diverse organisations nationally and abroad).  

Scope

1 Assure Business Continuity     Ensure that in the transition of over 200 services, many of which are complex and business critical, there is as much as possible, continuity of service.     Customer-care to manage end-user BC is expected to be co-ordinated by staff in LTS eLearning (with additional support from the new Central Support team).     Down-time episodes are anticipated whenever services are migrated. IS and LTS will need to co-ordinate these to optimise service availability. 2 Establish support for service development processes     An aim of this project is to establish and develop the business relationship between LTS eLearning and IS. LTS eLearning will require agility from IS    For this appropriate communication channels and processes for support, delivery and future expansion, need to be agreed.     The final support model cannot be expected to be defined at the outset.     The support model shall develop as the project progresses but is expected to become more clearly defined while the project is underway 3 Identify team responsibilities     Agree, clarify and publish responsibilities for each layer of the service.     Clarity of these responsibilities needs to be agreed and assigned to teams internal to IS and to eLearning services. 4 Migrate Services to IS     During the transition to IS managed servers, LTS IT Services staff will lead the operational details required for successful relocation of services.     IS staff collaborating with LTS ITS colleagues to ensure migrated components are configured and integrate to provide coherent services.     Clarify, agreee and publish processes and responsibilities.     Complete the transition while ensuring LTS eLearning team fulfil all their continuing development and end-user support responsibilities.  

Objectives

1) Setting up a governance mechanism to enable MVM and IS to review current and future service support and development 2) adapt the current support model provided by LTS IT Services, to fit service the support model provided by IS to ensure the eLearning team have access to the types of 1st/2nd/3rd line support they need 3) transition the existing responsibilities for management (platform upgrades, configuration, capacity, change and availability management) to appropriate teams in IS 4) transition the responsibility for software platform technology upgrades and security patching to IS 5) transition the responsibility for hardware lifecycle (through Virtualisation and scaleable storage hardware technology) to IS 6) ensure dedicated authentication and security setup is not compromised as part of transition 7) ensure services have adequate environments in place for successful delivery of service.  

Deliverables  

1) agree and publish the governance mechanism -  the project will develop a governance mechanism as the project progresses.      Part way through this project the requirements of the complete governance mechanism shall become clear and will be finalised. 2) categorise current services into three service types: - simple hosting - dedicated hosting - complex application 3) establish service delivery model for each service type - as the project progresses, the service delivery model shall develop. The service delivery model shall not be wholly defined at the outset, it will grow as its requirements become clear over the course of the project. 4) establish what infrastructure can be retained, and to what extent the LTS Servers and server rooms shall continue to be used in the short/medium and long terms. 5) establish end of life position of existing infrastructure to help inform decision-making about priorities 6) review authentication and security setup and define security model for service 7) review environment requirements by service type 8) establish service delivery and migration plan for each service type, including priority, dates and resources/costs 9) estimate the general build-infrastructure requirements and complete the build-structure requirements

10) migrate services and infrastructure

11) review existing service availability monitoring and and determine who shall take responsibilities for these in the migrated services

12) review existing change-control and operational procedures to determine suitability of these in the migrated context

13) review existing data backup processes and data management “archive” requirements to ensure continuity of these in the migrated context.  

Timescale

The time-scale for this project is expected to be of the order of a year or two, but early phases of the project should be able to indicate priorities and time-scales more accurately. It may be found that the overall transition might be able to proceed more rapidly than one year.

Benefits

Moving MVM to a standardised model for service support and delivery and continuity of service.  

Success Criteria

1)      A governance mechanism for all hosted MVM services is in place, with the right business and customer representation.

2)      The support model for MVM’s eLearning service team (or the new Teaching, Learning and Web Services team) services is in place

3)      A Service Model for MVM services is produced, agreed, published and communicated

4)      All infrastructure and applications IS is responsible for are kept up to date and are hosted securely.

5)      Changes to services are subject to IS change-control procedures.

6)      DEV, TEST and LIVE environments are available to enable eLearning development processes to ensure suitable development life-cycle

7)      MVM service delivery is maintained during and after moving supporting services to IS

8)      Hardware identified as retainable was retained. Documentation and responsibility for server warranties was transferred.