Closure Report

Project Summary

The ESPA website project was established to provide a stable infrastructure and deliver a series of site enhancements for the site espa.ac.uk to continue through the end of the ESPA programme and on to 2021. 

https://www.espa.ac.uk/ is the principal communication channel for the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation programme – a 9-year, £43.9M research programme .  The programme officially closed on 31^st March 2018 and the website project was established (April 2017- June 2018) to provide a stable infrastructure and deliver a series of site enhancements for the site to continue in legacy form until March 2022.  The users of the site are primarily in Europe, UK, Africa, Asia, North America and South America.  The website is the only central place where users can access information on this globally significant programme.   The site is in legacy form and no new content will be added to it after July 2018 but it will be fully accessible.  There are two Service Level Agreements in place which means the site will be robust and secure up to March 2022.

ESPA’s goal was to ensure that ecosystems will be conserved and managed more sustainably – in ways that alleviate poverty and enhance wellbeing.  ESPA was a global interdisciplinary research programme that aimed to give decision-makers and natural resource users the evidence they need to address the challenges of sustainable ecosystem management and poverty reduction.  This evidence is presented on the ESPA Legacy Website.  The research provided evidence of how ecosystems function (environment) and how the services that they provide support or undermine efforts to alleviate poverty and/or enhance well-being for poor people in developing countries.  The programme was developed by the UK Government in response to the findings of the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that substantial gains in human well-being in recent decades have been achieved at the expense of high and often irreversible levels of ecosystem degradation.  The UK Government funders were:  Department for International Development, Natural Environment Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

ESPA Directorate (which closed on 31^st July 2018) operated through Research into Results Limited (a wholly owned subsidiary company of the University of Edinburgh).  The Directorate was responsible to the funders for:  leading science, communicating research findings, supporting general communications, supporting pathways to impact, managing ESPAs assets, ensuring a living legacy (including the website) from the programme.  The programme was led by a partnership between the funders, RiR, other UK based stakeholders e.g. the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Scope, Deliverables and Objectives

The Brief defined the project objectives and deliverables as; 

Success Criteria and Benefits

The following success criteria were initially identified for this project:

Through delivering the continued provision of a fit for purpose website, indications are that this successful project will achieve all the expected benefits:

• Compliance with funders’ transparency requirements – ESPA will demonstrate programme outputs.
• Improved research citation and re-use levels arising from readily accessible assets.
• Having the confidence of the programme community as a trusted source of information for all stakeholder groups – decision-makers, influencers, practitioners and researchers.
• Delivering fit for purpose content, at the right time, to the right people.
• Providing consistent, trusted measures for discoverability and download of programme assets. 

In addition, there were two collateral benefits noted in the Brief.  The improvements to the site usability and surfacing of the data have facilitated these benefits and they will be achieved through maintaining the ESPA website through to 2021;

• Successor programmes and projects will be able to learn from ESPA assets such as lessons-learned and guidance information.
• Decision-makers will continue to find appropriate decision support evidence via ESPA.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 154 days (proposal and ToR estimate)

Staff Usage Actual: 141 days

Staff Usage Variance: -8.5%

Graphic Design or ESPA staff time and effort costs are not included in any of the above. 

Outcome

Explanation for variance

Key Learning Points

1. Regular virtual team meetings - the team were only all physically together for one meeting but worked well through virtual meetings and JIRA. 

2. A good working relationship was built up through the project but working with an external developer could have been improved with a document detailing expected standards, processes and defining roles and responsibilities for a developer. This would have set expectations, minimising assumptions and also allowing for both parties to enter in to the agreement with an understanding of all tasks involved. 

3. day rate - clarify in writing terms for funded work and clearly define any constraints around day rate agreements

4. Use of JIRA - This became a very useful and well used tool for the project which was used as central communication tool and tracker for discussion on the requirements. Given the project build phases lasted 9 months this was valuable in maintaining a thorough record of progress and decisions. However, in the early stages of the project, lack of explanation of the benefits for using such a tool and 

Outstanding Issues

An initial draft of the documentation required for testing the website post patches or support maintenance has been created and this will be finalised with input from the ESPA communications manager and the IS Apps production coordinator over the coming weeks. 

A small task may be required to support ESPA in identifying and removing all traces of legacy pdf files that ESPA no longer want visable and are no longer (or not thought to be) linked on the site but are being returned on wider web searches. A list is being compiled and, if support is needed, this would require a small number of files to be manually removed from the database.