Report for August 2012

AP Number

Project Title

Discretionary/Compliance/Funded 

Planning Month Year

Delivery Month Year

RAG Status

GREEN  / AMBER / RED

Plan

Dependencies

ACS027

Consolidate AS Infrastructure

Category: Funded

Milestones

RAG Status

RED

Report by Iain Dobson for  August 2012 

• In August testing of the new test infrastructure revealed two problems in addition to the known issues with failover scripts not enabling SQL jobs used by Kx websites.  The new issues were:

  * Inability to take ERA payments (used by the Student Application and Student Contracts processes)

  * Inability to upload KxRegistration invoices to eFinancials.

  We also experienced an issue in Production of website unavailability in response to scheduled operating system software patching.

  Investigation by the supplier into the outage to Production websites raised their concern that the failover scripts they deployed had been incorrectly amended since go:live.  This issue raises questions about our change-control management of the service and is noted for review during the signoff review.  The supplier corrected the scripts however these cannot be validated until the next failover event (planned or otherwise).

  The ERA payments issue proved complex with several points of failure which has required both the supplier and IS Development technology to resolve separate issues.  IS Dev tech identified a flaw in the ERA ColdFusion code which required specialist resource from IS Development who quickly found a required change to the code which when applied resolved the failing payments issue.

  The inability to upload invoices to eFinancials has required IS Dev Tech, Kinetics and FIS resource.  It took significant effort to identify each of the problems within the process and honest mistakes were made during setup by both IS and Kinetics.  These mistakes complicated matters and resulted in significant delay.

  The failover scripts in test were also updated by the supplier however testing has shown these to not yet be satisfactory.  The supplier continues to work on these.

• Inability to take ERA payments (used by the Student Application and Student Contracts processes)
• Inability to upload KxRegistration invoices to eFinancials.
• Also experienced an issue in Production of website unavailability in response to scheduled operating system software patching.
• RAG status RED, due to above issues needing resolved and milestones revised.

• Resolve issues reported above
• Deployment Sign Off:  05/10
• Completion: 18/10

Following concerns regarding the status of the project, Project Services have investigated the above issues.  It transpires that the issues were present in the previous Test infrastructure, and are not a result of the new Test infrastructure. 

On Monday afternoon (10th Sep) the status of the issues were as follows:

1. Failover - Production Management have set aside some time tomorrow (Tuesday 11th) to look at this.  They are planning to start work on it late morning (after 11:30) and will call ACS before they start so that ACS ensure people are out of the test system.  They may need some time, so the test system should be regarded as out of action for a few hours.

2. ERA - this is currently with Kinetics awaiting a further fix

3. Invoice interface - currently with Gordon Forbes awaiting loading into eFin

Project Code (AP Number)

Project Title

Discretionary/Compliance/Funded 

Report by [PM] 

This project was closed/withdrawn on dd-mmm-yy

[for closures] Please see the Completion Report / Closure Review for further information [include link]. 

[for withdrawn] Please see the PRICCL log for further details [include link].