Completion Report

Project Summary:

The stated objectives for this project were:

In the project brief, the following deliverables were identified:

All of the objectives and deliverables have been achieved. One modification to the project scope was the postponement of the deployment of the Change and Release modules in March. This change is covered in issue 17. The deployment had been planned for mid-March but the project team at Durham University had asked for the deployment to be pushed back until they felt more ready to go ahead with this work. This was agreed across the team at UoE, and with Durham unable to give a definite date at that time, it was decided that the best approach would be to remove this step from the scope and allow Durham time to suggest their preferred date, with any effort required at our end being done under the support arrangements. Again, this was agreed by all stakeholders.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 31 days

Staff Usage Actual: 50 days

Staff Usage Variance: 60%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Additional effort

*This figure is taken from the original estimation spreadsheet but the figure submitted to WIS (at planning) and replicated on the project website was 30 days.

The original estimate for the project was 30 days, but the final figure is 50 days overall. There have been two PICCLs for additional effort - one for 5 days in November (issue 10) and a second one for an additional 15 days in February (issue 16 ). These obviously brought the final approved total to 50 days. The first increase covered extra effort that had been used up to the date of the issue; this had largely been used on work to import the hardware database. The second PICCL also covered effort that had accrued over the lifetime of the project, largely for project management and the deployment at Durham, and also included projected time that was required to conclude the project.

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

• Project Management - this has risen through a combination of a number of issues on the project that had not been anticipated (see Issue log) and time used by the Programme Manager to support the PM during this period.
• Planning - there was no time for this in the original estimate, and may have been included (when estimating) in the figure for project management
• Integration - the increase in actual effort for this stage can be offset against the reduced effort for the build, and may simply be a consequence of recording effort under a different stage from that originally estimated.
• Deployment - this increase is attributable to the additional effort needed to address the Hardware Import problem reported in issue 14.
• Unplanned Activity - the additional effort recorded here covers time for various meetings, discussions among the project team, and work to address the issues that arose with mail relay, Treewalk and configuration of databases.

Extended duration

This project has encountered several delays, with the original main deployment having to move from its original planned date of 26th October to 7th December, and then to 13th January, which is when it did indeed go live. The first shift of date was recorded under issue 4 in early October and the reason was simply that Durham University were unable to commit to the scheduled date. The second change was recorded in late November (issue 12) and states that the reason for moving the date was that Durham were unable to meet the proposed date. As said, the deployment went ahead shortly after, and the final deployment was lined up for mid-March. However, this has been withdrawn and the closure has now been undertaken with a small delay to the published milestone because of the PM being on annual leave.

Scope Changes:

The only scope change is that noted above - the removal of the deployment of the Change and Release modules, which will be organised for a later date that suits Durham University

Key Learning Points:

Feedback from the project team at UoE, include the following, "in terms of lessons learned, this one has gone pretty smoothly (from our end), so I've nothing particular to note.  We were correct to suggest that Durham not begin using all the modules simultaneously, and indeed they've recognised that themselves by further delaying their utilisation of the functionality delivered in the project."

Further advice from the project team is that we need new PMs to adhere to our project approach and to record issues to an appropriate level of detail to allow the programme manager, portfolio manager, and potentially other project manager(s) to pick up / report on progress. The programme manager had emphasised this need from the start of this project, and throughout, via feedback meetings with the initial PM. However the level of detail on project issues and how they were managed was not always forthcoming despite repeated requests to do so. This resulted in an overhead for the programme manager and challenges with handover to the replacement PM.

The Programme Manager raised concerns to the Project Sponsor (now left) on the appropriateness of some of the early communications from the PM to the customer and also raised these with the PM to ensure that the communications were professional and positive, whilst being transparent about any issues that needed to be addressed.

Fortunately the project was straightforward, but more detail could have been captured to provide visibility on how issues were managed in order to reduce the overhead for the Programme Manager and Portfolio Manager, and to provide a better record for potential serious issues later in the project.

Outstanding issues:

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