Completion Report

Project Summary:

The Trend 963 BEMS (Building Energy Management System)

• This is a third party application utilised by Estates and Buildings to monitor the heating, cooling and ventilation systems across a number of specific buildings throughout the University estate
  • This is utilised by critical installations within animal research labs and holding areas and category 3 labs, where in the event of identified issues, alarms are sent to Security to investigate. In addition, the system sends automatic daily environmental charts to Lab Managers to ensure that strict Home Office requirements are being maintained.
  • The controllers communicate with the central server by pushing data to server
  • The existing Trend 963 BEMS application currently exists on a stand-alone desktop pc in Estates, for which there is no automatic backup, system patching or disaster recovery facilities for the current installation – all events requiring time consuming manual intervention from the resident Control Systems Engineers who manage the systems.

This project has provided a more robust, managed and resilient system through automatic backups and the ability to transfer within the IS infrastructure in the event of potential disaster

Deliverables

All the deliverables were met bar  Excel.

• To install MS Excel on the Servers
  • The project investigated this work and the disadvantages resulted in another method being utilised. As such it was no longer a required deliverable of the project sponsor and this project
  • The removal of the Excel requirement was covered in the reduction of the approved project estimate in PICCL 3

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 82 days

Staff Usage Actual: 59 days

Staff Usage Variance: -28%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

• Project went very smoothly which resulted in less time being required than was originally estimated.
• See the PICCL Log for further details (PICCL 3)
• Some small items required resolved between delivery and deployment sign off requiring a few days, the project sponser approved the increased effort.

Key Learning Points:

Ensure to verify that any new items included in Live have previously been implemented to Test first

• While verifications were happening over the session drop out issue, it transpired that Test was not in an identical state to Live. AlwaysUp is now being installed in Test (during November)

Outstanding issues:

• Problem making a remote desktop connection.

  1. Whilst there was and is no evidence that errors existed (after investigation), no action has been taken and there has been no-reoccurrence of this issue. This issue cannot be replicated.

  2. The November monthly windows update took place with no issues and it is felt that the project can now be closed.