Closure Report
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Project Summary
The project was initiated to deliver improvements across the ITI Enterprise Services virtual hosting environment by utilising the features offered using the VMWare integrated Container functionality. This project aimed to make the current hosting infrastructure easier to manage and drive process improvement, efficiency, quality and best practice.
The project suffered delays throughout due to staff availability, prioritisation of project work and availability of other areas within the University to complete UAT. The project was stopped on several occasions to enable team members to work on other higher priority work and projects, this resulted in considerable slippage and this is reflected in the need to continually re-plan and the delivery date moving from November 2018 to January 2020.
Problems were encountered in relation to the technical design provided by the supplier not being able to be build as indicated and the project team requiring to investigate and identify a solution to enable them to build the end product.
This closure report will outline the objectives, deliverables, achievements and lessons learned during the is project and is offered for approval by the key stakeholders.
This project delivered a new service, on top of the existing hardware and virtualisation platforms already provided and supported by ITI.
Operational aspects covered the implementation of the VMWare Integrated container build functionality as well as updating supporting documentation to reflect he upgrades and additional features delivered by the project. The project delivered an Enterprise grade repository (Harbor) and container manager (Admiral) as part of the solution.
Objectives
The key objectives of this project were to:
- Deliver a critical Enterprise Container Infrastructure to help run traditional and container applications together on a common platform.
- Provide security, isolation and management of VM's
- Enable upstream consumers to utilise the speed and agility of containers
The outlined objectives of the project were achieved, although the original configuration of the solution was more complex than originally anticipated and UoE technical teams had to work with the supplier to reconfigure the planned implementation.
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 70 days
Staff Usage Actual: 68 days
Project Manager Usage Estimate: 12 days
Project Manager Usage Actual: 30 days
App Service Resource Estimate: 20 days
App Service Resource Actual: 0 days
Explanation for Variance
The reason for this variance was due to the elongated timeline for the delivery of the service, continued re-planning and re-scheduling of the project and the problems that had arisen during configuration and UAT timescales.
The project started in May 2018, the original planned end date was 7th November 2018. The project closure in January 2020 represents a major slippage o 14 months. This variance was caused by several other factors including the priority of the project, staff availability, configuration issues and availability of the other areas of the University to complete UAT.
Key Learning Points
The key finding from the project was that a focused approach to delivery would have averted delays.
See all lessons - ENT028 Lessons Learned Log
Learning Point: Resource availability should be committed prior to the project starting.
Issue: Requirements and deliverables were not fully understood at outset of project
Learning Point: Full engagement with stakeholder to attain detailed requirements and expected project outputs.
Issue: Technologies being used to implement the end product were unknown, leading to poor estimation and in project learning
Learning Point: Where possible technical team members should have training in the technologies they are using to enable better time estimations.
Outstanding Issues
- Certificates will need to be generated and deployed automatically and this work is currently not complete, but will be delivered when the LastPass Project becomes live in March 2020