Impact

Priority and Funding

This is a Priority 1 Director initiative with a Programme Prioritisation rating of 12. Funding is direct – Estates are holding a fund of £200K on behalf of the IT Infrastructure Division of ISG that was previously secured from the College of Science and Engineering. An additional £50K through a small capital grant project from Estates has also been identified.

 

Further funding of £250K is being requested from the Campus Sustainability Fund.

 

Service Excellence - Information and Security

Are we using standard builds for the project (that is, pre-validated security controls will be in place for infrastructure and data)? Or Do we anticipate having to develop non-standard infrastructure? Will we have third party integrations on installations? Are we dealing with data outwith our standard set of controls? If so, What level of risk is associated with the data? What are the appropriate controls?

  • The project must outline how it is dealing with risk, how the need to design/build/test impacts on project scope, budget and timeline.
  • Confirm which University or divisional polices are providing guidance here.
  • Set Security design, execution and acceptance as a Deliverable
  • Quality Assurance - Create a Security Milestone for Delivery - and Design, Build and Acceptance depending on project complexity - that must be signed-off by Project Manager and Section Head.
  • Create any specific risks around security

 

Service Excellence - Process Improvement, efficiency, quality and best practice (Social Responsibility and and Sustainability)

If the project could or will lead to recycling of hardware then

  • Create a milestone called 'Recycle - Engagement' so that the project can engage with the Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability at the appropriate time
  • Add a Benefit to the ITI Benefits Management and Realisation log (ITI Projects Sharepoint)

Is there an opportunity to take advantage of the Green IT Initiative for further funding?

Otherwise set as Not Applicable.

 

 

Digital Transformation

Indicate if and how the project itself is contributing to Digital Transformation.

Will  it use available resources or funding specific to the initiative? e.g. using the services of the ISG Usability Team, applying for Digital Transformation funding. Are we using new techniques or tools or processes in this project that can be used to transform how we work in general?

 

 

IS Change Programme - How will the execution of this project promote the Themes

Indicate if the project itself (during plan, execution, implementation) contributes to the themes with the IS Change Programme.

IS Change Programme Theme How the project process will contribute to change
Project Management  
Working Together

Will the project team talk to other colleagues across IS? Can they bring previous experience and fresh thinking to the project?

Add working together to your Communication Plan - go beyond the stakeholders. How will you raise awareness of the project with your colleagues across the divisions? Might you work closer - co-locate, for example?

Could the processes involved in the project itself be improved - what is difficult to do? Is the Admin cumbersome, time-consuming? Add to the Closure Report.

Look to guidance from the IS Change Management team on how to approach this.

 

Standards and Technical Leadership  
Staff Learning and Development

Is there an opportunity for the project to offer development opportunities for colleagues?

Could someone from another team in our division or another ISG division be seconded to the project to provide skills we may be struggling to find in this period?

Can we offer a development opportunity for someone in our division at a lower grade - to come into our project and be skilled up, fulfill a higher grade role for a while?

For planning, make sure you allow the necessary time to engage / recruit in your project, and feed back to the annual plan/forward look?

Set out why this project does not or cannot take advantage of this change theme.

 

Service Based Culture

Are we helping the service to shift-left?

For services impacted by the change we are delivering : check the Service Catalogue (due for 2016/17) for Service Owner and Service Operations Manager. Confirm with them who should be stakeholders on the project. Also check with head of IS Helpline. Confirm at what stages if the project SO/SOM want representation and sign-off - especially around Design and UAT and Delivery.  Do we need a Handover? Add Stakeholders to these Milestones.

Is there a CMDB entry to update to reflect changes?

 

Equality and Diversity

Planning: Discuss the Project Board, project team and key stakeholders with your Sponsor - do the groupings reflect/promote diversity?

Be aware of particular periods or dates that may conflict with religious or social or domestic  obligations.

Design: Are we designing a User Interface?  Are we designing with best practice in Usability and Accessibility for all devices? Please explicitly ensure that the Design of the UI has been checked for promotion of Equality and Diversity. e.g.  Use 'Mx' in the Honorifics section- - but do we even need honorifics - how much information do we actually need to collect from a user? Does our interface make assumptions about the kinds of people our users are? Do we accommodate people who are at a distance, working flexibly, may not wish to be identified by gender, race, age or show a photo?   Do we give options as to what services users might want or do we assume they will want what we want, or what users have wanted in the past?

Are we being creative in thinking about use cases beyond the metrics and other ‘evidence' we have for users in the past -  not simply recreating/perpetuating old ways of working?

How are we naming a Service (or even Hardware) ? Consider a naming convention to highlight or promote Equality and Diversity. Do we have the opportunity in this to promote role models or show our understanding of  diversity?  Would this give us an additional route for comms or stakeholder engagement? e.g UCL named their HPC ‘Grace’ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/news/isd-news/research-it/introducing-grace  which gave them an added ‘good news story’ and a chance to dispel myths that there are no women in computing.

Quality Assurance: Add a Design Milestone and a separate Milestone for Acceptance Sign-Off. The Design Milestone confirms that the UI has been checked for promotion of Equality and Diversity, and that we have designed an inclusive UI. Add to the Design Milestone, or better, create a separate Usability Milestone for Design and QA.

There must be a separate EqIA Milestone to show that this has been done. Ensure that appropriate authority is signing off on the legal aspects of Equality and Diversity.

 

Innovation

Has this project the potential to deliver innovation?

The project delivery itself may be an innovation - a new service, for example?

But could different ways of doing things be trialled? Could the project team talk to stakeholders and IS colleagues about innovation? Digital transformation is one consideration.

List any innovations that were delivered in your Closure Report.  If an innovation was tried and failed - also add to the Closure Report - it is okay to fail.

Flexible Resourcing

Have we considered contract staff, students and interims (and in future, apprentices)? Can a difficult resourcing situation be resolved by use of fixed term staff or limited  secondments?

For planning, make sure you allow the necessary time to engage / recruit in your project, and feed back to the annual plan/forward look.

Set out why this project does not or cannot take advantage of this change theme.

Communication and Branding

Communication: Ensure that you have a session as part of planning for Stakeholder identification and analysis. Set out the communication plan by the end of the project brief - or set a milestone date for when you will have this in place if end of planning not possible. Project Manager is the accountable person and will sign-off the milestone.

Branding: Are you delivering a new Service or significantly upgrading a new service? If so, then the project team must engage with the new Branding guidelines and Change Management Theme team for ISG, the branding for the school or college via the college marketing team, the University's Comms and Marketing team - potentially all of these.

Use gel.ed.ac.uk to access assets and guidelines for branding of communications, websites, mobiles.

Use the Student Digital Guidelines.

Quality Assurance: A milestone must be created for Branding and the Project Manager must sign-off as the accountable person.

 

 

Project Info

Project
Data Centre Efficiency & Expansion
Code
ENT022
Programme
ITI - Enterprise Services (ENT)
Management Office
ISG PMO
Project Manager
Lawrence Stevenson
Project Sponsor
Graeme Wood
Current Stage
Close
Status
Closed
Project Classification
Run
Start Date
18-Jan-2017
Planning Date
13-Oct-2017
Delivery Date
18-Jun-2019
Close Date
30-Jul-2019
Programme Priority
1
Overall Priority
Highest
Category
Discretionary