Completion Report

Project Summary:

This project progressed the work required to ensure the University met its legislative obligations for applying any Tax or other annual compliance updates for Oracle HR & Payroll. This is a standard recurring event (although not multi-year) to meet HM Revenue & Customs requirements.  There was a significant IS and Business Partner input, to ensure the HRMS application had been updated to the appropriate legislative status, and completed the actual Tax Year End.

The scope of the project included;

• HMRC tax patches issued by Oracle
• Up to date Oracle security patches
• Upto date P60
• Any Legislative updates required by the March 2015 Budget

All scope, objectives and deliverables have been met for PPP003. See the details in the sections below for specific details of interest..

In contrast to the last few years with Real Time Information and Auto Enrolement, this year has been much more straightforward. Although there were many additional unplanned patches and security patches this year, it was all sucessfully accommodated.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 100 days

Staff Usage Actual: 100 days

Staff Usage Variance: 0%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Although there were several additions to the project work and more time was expected to be required, the extra time was not utilised.  This was aided :

• by an experienced focussed team
• the fact that the extra work was incorporated within the agreed budget
• that the patches (of which there were a considerable number of unexpected ones) all progressed through Dev, Test and Live very smoothly.

Estimates

Proposal estimated was 100 days with the Brief estimating 130 days, however thoughout the project as it progressed better than expected the estimate was reduced to 110 and the actual usage was 100 days

Process Change Log details can be found in

• PICCL Log
• Of special interest are the delays at the start of the project that can be found in PICCL 2, PICCL 4, PICCL 5 and PICCL 6

Milestones

Milestones can be found in

• Project  Milestones

Phase 1 for RUP 7  included 4 additional patches progressed during February.

Phase 2 included a larger number of security patches where only 6 (out of 9) could be included in TYE Phase 2.

After this work was complete urgent unexpected work arrived for Shared Parental Leave which also included 2 Security Patches as well as an Oracle Bug Fix which went live on 6-Apr-15

Updated P60 was mailed on 28th April

No budget changes were required and Phase 3 was withdrawn.

A further urgent Oracle TYE Bug Fix and HR Jar File work was implemented 6-Jul-15

For the 9th security patch Oracle requested a conference call with the Dev Tech, after which nothing was heard of until more recently. Where Oracle came back with a work-around which Dev Tech investigated and verified in Dev. This is now being progressed via support  - I150624-0740 Oracle HR Security Patch (9th)

Key Learning Points:

Key Learning Points

For this project the planning team need to be conscious in planning time for HR and Payroll to do hi-level testing in Dev as well as Test. Then to allow final signoff in Live after Payroll have completed all their checks (potentially at least 2 weeks later).

Expect that go live dates will normally occur in the first few days of the month to fit in with the HR & Payroll processes

No Senior for Dev Team HR & Payroll has currently been appointed to replace the current Team Lead, which is a loss of  a significant amount of technical knowledge, however this project has procceeded well.

HR Jar File came up as an Oracle warning at this time in the patching process, however there was no indicated date when this was changing to be a requirement, further detail has been included below.

HR Jar File has the following benefit

• Oracle are gradually increasing security around this area, and the University would have been forced to implement code signing at some point in the future.  By doing so now, we have avoided being forced to do so at a less convenient time.
• This was beneficial due to the smooth running of this project it could be accommodated without any impact on Budget and Milestones.
• This work was delivered with the 6-Jul work for Oracle TYE Bug Fix
  • IS Apps now have a procedure for obtaining and using a code signing certificate, which has been added to the HR documentation.
  • The University’s certificate ordering procedure has been modified to include code signing certificates (rather than just SSL).
  • The certificate and the procedure are applicable to any application which requires to sign code in the future (not just HR).

Outstanding issues:

No outstanding issues

However something to consider in the future re JAVA warnings:

• The eduni signed certificate is not enough to stop all java warnings when running HR (although we now get fewer), so we should consider getting a 3rd party certificate which should do.