Closure Review
Project Summary:
Contributors
Role | Department | Name |
Project Manager (Owner) | IS Applications | Craig Middlemass |
Programme Manager | IS Application | Maurice Franceschi |
Production Management Coordinator | IS Applications | Stuart Craig |
Business Area Manager | ECA | Claire Davies |
Project Sponsor | ECA | Jared Taylor |
| Developer | IS Applications | John Allison |
Project Review
Objectives
The objective for this project was to complete a number of enhancements to the exam boards processes.
Deliverables
All of the enhancements were delivered ahead of the exam boards commencing, with agreement of the project team the Deployment Sign Off was extended to cover all of the exam boards, a number of additional enhancements were raised during exam boards which were built, tested and deployed within a few days, these were:
* Degree banding calculation for MFA2 students was not correct due to a bug.
* Bad precision in calculating grade breakdown was causing inaccurate degree banding results for students with certain grade combinations.
* Board reports (all colours) were not ordering by surname as expected.
* File character encoding on Euclid XML and CSV downloads was not set to UTF-8. This caused problems where students had unusual characters in their names.
* Programme VTNGTINTAR1F had no progression recommendation rules associated with it, which caused errors when trying to calculate it.
* UGT 5 cohorts similarly had no progression recommendation rules.
* Refreshing the browser immediately after creating or confirming aggregate grades would result in duplicate sets of grades being created, which cause problems further in the exam board process.
Scope
As stated above all of the agreed enhancements were delivered and a number of additional enhancements were implemented during the post implementation support period.
Schedule
The project did run approximately 2 weeks behind schedule following clarifications of requirements, however, the enhancements were still deployed prior to the start of exam boards.
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 45 days
Staff Usage Actual: 49 days
Staff Usage Variance: 9%
Other Resource Estimate: 0 days
Other Resource Actual: 0 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
The additional days were due to some clarifications on requirements and a number of post implementation enhancements put in place while exam boards were running.
Key Learning Points:
Having an extended support period worked well with this project as exam boards in particular can bring out exceptional cases that cannot always be accounted for in User Acceptance Testing.
The quick turnaround time on post implementation support was appreciated and was only able to be provided by keeping the developer assigned to the project.
Outstanding issues:
None