Completion Report

Project Summary:

Lynda.com provides a comprehensive library of online video courses covering a range of digital, creative and business skills topics. A campus-wide licence was procured for use by all staff, students and visitors.

This exciting new resource supports ISG and wider University strategic plans by transforming the way we offer digital skills training, increasing our capacity for digital skills development and enabling us to meet our aspirations. It will make a key contribution to Digital Transformation, the Learning, Teaching & Student Experience programme and the Service Excellence Programme. It will also help to develop a digital culture within the University and support staff, students and visitors to improve their digital skills for work, study and life.

Out of scope:

• Due to the lack of resources available to enable visitor access to Lynda.com, the project team made the decision to remove this from scope

• Following review of the VLE integration with Lynda.com it was agreed that the product to enable this was not ‘fit for purpose’ and was deemed out of scope

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 24 days

Staff Usage Actual: 128 days

Staff Usage Variance: 533%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Original budget for Soft Launch = 24 days

Overall Approved Budget = 132 days

Increases to budget due to the following:

1. The initial request for Project Services support was to delivery up to and including Soft Launch based on original Business Requirements. Unfortunately, due to data protection challenges the original Business Requirements de-scoped significantly removing integration with LEARN/Moodle, VRS and BI. Project Services was asked to continue providing support to deliver the remaining requirements, increase of 25 days approved
2. 16/17 Budget sponsor funding approved - 23 days

3. PM requested to co-ordinate the UAT activities associated with regard to the integration of LEARN and Moodle from the Business User perspective. Create a report based on feedback to evidence whether integration with LEARN and/or Moodle should go ahead – increase of 5 days approved

4. Following a POC Business Objects/BI Reporting status review on 16/08/16, it was agreed with the Project Sponsor and Programme Manager that the resource budget be increased. increase of 10 days approved

5. Business Objects Universe integration/reporting experienced a number of challenges relating to development resource conflicts and priority commitments taking president over progressing with delivery throughout the lifecycle of the project. A further increase of 40 days of resourcing required to deliver the Lynda.com Reporting (BO/BI) work package.

What went well:

1. Nikki Hackett-Reed, Project Manager  felt engagement with Helpline went very well. We had a clear picture of the key deliverables and dates. We were involved with reviewing the communications. All frontline support staff had awareness training from the project so we had a clear picture of what was being delivered. From our point of view it was a very successful project.
2. The general feedback from the project team was they had worked well as a team to deliver this project.

Key Learning Points:

1. Visitor Access was identified as a requirement very late in the delivery of this work package as not originally in scope. As no firm agreement was approved to confirm Visitors requirements, this resulted in delays to this activity and the decision to remove form scope. The original Project Manager felt that technically it would have been additional work but it would have brought a large benefit to the user community that is not covered comfortably as either matriculated students or staff on the main payroll. As it stands staff from EUSA and Edinburgh Research and Innovation as well as casual tutors, emeritus staff etc. are denied access to the service.
2. Account Archiving was an additional workstream added to the FULL Launch deliverable. Following investigation and analysis, it was decided to identify users that had not logged in to Lynda.com in the past 6 months, and send a list of these users to Lynda.com for bulk archiving via csv. file. The initial investigation was focused on providing a much more integrated and complex solution, which in the end was not required. The lesson learned would be for future projects regarding this type of archiving to keep it simple and not over-complicate processes unnecessarily.
3. VLE Integration with LEARN and Moodle was a known challenge that the supplier Lynda.com had led the project team to believe was achievable. The reality was that the integration was not a quality product and embedding a URL into course pages became our only satisfactory workable solution.  Vendor interaction and engagement could have better best plus their development of a new BB for Learn has stalled with no feedback. There was no clear escalation process within Lynda and the project contact was helpful however they were more on the technical side than account / relationship management perspective.
4. The service owner has suggested that for future projects, to avoid where possible having a PM who is new to the University with a Business Lead who is new to the projects process on the same project. The project could probably have moved along more quickly if one or the other of the people in these roles had more experience of the process to draw on.
5. It would also noted, if the project team had been involved at the engagement stage with new supplier, they would have had sight of any potential problem areas, at an early point in the project. This may have helped reduce resource effort charged to the project and resulted in an earlier delivery of reporting.

Outstanding issues:

1. VLE Integration with LEARN and Moodle: Quality of integration with Lynda remains a contractual discussion to be undertaken
2. EQIA Completion : this is to be taken forward and completed by the Service owner