Completion Report
Project Summary:
Background
- The current Path service was built as a research project for 3 schools in the College of Science and Engineering and was successfully delivered in December 2013. Path (http://path.is.ed.ac.uk/) has been very well received and this project was needed to allow the service to be expanded to more schools. It was initially thought to expand it to the remaining schools from the College of Science and Engineering and the school of Biomedical Sciences .
- Another expansion of the Path service into schools within HSS and MVM has also been set as an objective. It was thought that approaching schools to take the Path service as used in CSE was not a good strategy apart from one or two possible schools e.g. SPS. However, offering Path with an option that would only use the current student record data view and therefore would require little engagement from academic and administrative would be a valuable option. It was expected that we could pilot Path with a number of schools in HSS/MVM. This would provide feedback on how well the user interface works for students who have much wider choices than those typically seen by science and engineering students. This feedback is expected to inform future developments of Path and PCIM (Programme and Course Information Management).Path will fall under the PCIM project within the Student Systems Partnership programme from 14/15.
Were the project goals met? Yes
Were the project deliverables fully or partially accomplished? Yes, fully accomplished
The goals of the projects were (including priority) :
- Move current Path to IS infrastructure (mandatory)
- Current manual feed is made automatic (mandatory)
- Path is performant (high)
- Enhance Path functionality to improve support for larger audiences (high)
- Student Systems Operations (SSO) support this new service (mandatory)
The following deliverables were achieved (from project brief)
- Path Service is on a corporate IS infrastructure, and is supported by IS Production from August 2014.
- The feed from the EUGEX EUCLID layer is automatic
- Path has been load tested and is performant under load
- The following enhancements have been done:
- Ability to switch Path options on/off
- Restructure course listings pages to make them easier to navigate and locate listings.
- Update search to allow users to find courses by things other than name (delivery, subject areas, years taken etc.)
- Restructure degree listings within a school
- Restructure moderator / school assignments to better support splintered / discipline based schools
- Improvements for school admins
- Integrate Path's timetables with the Course Timetable Browser
- Update MyEd channel
- SSO has managed the communication, training and business support, as part of this project
The following deliverables were not explicitly described in the Brief but were delivered:
- The homepage was redesigned to improve site navigation
- Additional enhanced-visuals options were added for colour blind users
Did the project deliver a solution to the problems being addressed? Yes
Does the Project Sponsor agree that this project can be closed at this time? Yes
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Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 110 days
Staff Usage Actual: 130 days
Staff Usage Variance: 18%
Other Resource Estimate: 1 days
Other Resource Actual: 1 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
1. Budget:
There was more effort required as follow (https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/sce003/issues/4):
- as more schools joined in (13 schools, we had intilially targetted 9 schools at the beginning of this project) there has been more unplanned meetings and demos to Schools and other Committees from the development team - 8 days
- unplanned: performance issue - Due to issues encountered during the build, the developer re-wrote part of the code and part of the PHP framework to improve its performance.
- load testing & issue resolution- Initial load test budget was planned at 1 day. It was also agreed to have a more comprehensive load test which also required mentoring (total 3 days effort)
- UAT: more effort required from the development team to handover to SS Operations and shadow the schools during user testing
- increase in deployment effort . Deployment in Test took longer than expected. For Live: the person who did test deployment was not available to do LIVE due to other priority bookings; additional time was needed to complete the tasks, and from the test deployer who was able to provide limited support.
- PM cover during deployment: there was further effort to manage project due to last minute unavailability (sickness) of PM
- Post live support: handover to SS Operations and training materials: 4d (was 2d)
The project was agreed as 110d IS core funded and can't be increased for 13/14 (effort was 123.8d in 13/14.) it was to be done out of spare capacity with Paul and Greg'spriority work being Path. The carry over to 14/15 is 6d and is funded by SSP programme.
2. Go Live milestone delay
This was due to the Dev environment not being completed: caused by ITI work delays This prevented from starting the mandatory build by SSP.https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/sce003/issues/2
Key Learning Points:
What went well?
- From a business point of view: more schools joined in to this new service (total of 13 schools, representing more than half of the student popultation), highlighting the success of this service.
- Usage: with little advertising of the new service, it is already proving much more popular. Our average daily number of unique visitors is up from around 30 pre-launch to over 200, and we expect this number to grow further. We've had almost 2500 sessions on the site since launch, with an average session duration of just under 10 minutes, almost 15 pages per visit on average, and a low bounce rate of just 13% - so our visitors who come to the site are then using the service.
- Confident in delivering a service which will be performant during fresher's week following the load testing results
- All non mandatory enhancements were delivered.
- Some Live deployments were able to be done earlier (because this is in relation to the new environment which nobody will be using) so that we could be ready for the switch over, with very limited impact for users during switch over.
-Communication with users during UAT and Live deployment was well managed by Service Owner, with guidance provided by the project team. Transition from project to service went smoothly. It was useful to have the same person as sponsor and service owner.
-No calls reported to IS Production since it has gone live end July.
- Student comments
“Good enhancements to an already great service.”
“I've never used Path before, but I'm very impressed! It looks and works great.”
“Much better than DRPS - looks better, easier to find things, easy to navigate. This new version [is] easier to navigate than previous versions of PATH.”
- Staff comment
“Very useable for someone who is not particularly IT literate!”
What didn’t go so well?
1. Delay in getting the Dev environment built by ITI/Dev Tech, though planning the Test and Live environments with ITI were better.
2. Implementation to Test took longer than expected, so did the Live deployment. The person who did the Test deployment in Dev Tech was not available to do the Live deployment, though he supported it (which increased the effort).
Note this was a long and complex implementation, included migrations of data between MySql to Oracle
3.Live deployment: some changes were made outwith SVN and deployed without awareness of the MyEd project(s).
SVN should be used, and the project team delivering the changes should be aware of the procedure to deploy for MyEd (the Insite page detailing how to implement MyEd changes had not been updated).
Action completed in SSP: message sent out to point to the new development guide, and that SVN should be used for all content (barring test/live database connection settings etc which aren&³1;t stored in SVN).
4. Main Dev Tech staff required further support, which increased the cost of the environments build and deployments.
The fact that one of the Senior members from Dev Tech who was required at times was on holidays caused significant delays. Also, the fact that some tasks were assigned to different members of the team caused spending more time in familiarising with the required tasks.
5. The PM which was handed over project during annual leave fell sick. The PM role was taken over by another PM with no handover at a busy period.
6. Changes made to EUGEX layer as part of SAC018, caused some delays in load test and further checks.
7. SCE003 was the 1st project involving PHP on Oracle framework on this scale. There was a learning curve during the build phase.
8. Re-estimation at the end of the build phase end June did not take place. This would have highlighted budget overspent, which should have been communicated to project sponsor. However there would not have been any possible de-scope as all the non mandatory requirements had already been built well before the Dev environment was built (as Paul and Greg were looking for work). The reasons for the overspent has been detailed in the budget variance above.
If you had a project like this again, what would you improve?
- Plan Work with ITI earlier if possible, to avoid delays occuring.
- Ensure that same person in Dev Tech is booked to do both Test and Live deployments. If not, factor effort for support time.
- PHP/Oracle/Yii framework: the combination of the 3 require effort to improve performance (see details on the following blog http://www.appsdev.is.ed.ac.uk/blog/?p=176) . To be considered for future development.
Outstanding issues:
- There was an initiation for R&D to discuss near real time update for PATH (https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/sce003/meetings/rd-meeting-26-may).
R&D proposal may be completed in the Path follow up project as part of PCIM (Programme and Course Information Management)
- Post Live issue: Student Systems Operations have identified a bug where a small subset of courses simply cannot be viewed on Path.Essentially every course instance created since we launched won't be accessible on Path, as of 15/8 there were 72 new course instances affected, but any future instances created will have the same problem.The issue is that Path is not creating a separate mandatory entry for each instance when it imports brand new ones.
Fix has been done by the project team , deployed to Live 20/8 and checked by SSP (being managed by https://www.jira.is.ed.ac.uk/browse/SCE003-84)