Closure Report

EST099 Project Closure Report 240619 v1_0.doc

Project Summary

The University of Edinburgh (UoE) has over 550 buildings within its estate. These buildings house assets which are maintained on a reactive basis.  Some assets are also checked and maintained on a proactive basis and in line with observing regulatory bodies. The management and record keeping of these assets is key not only from a compliance perspective, but also with regards the performance and efficiency of the overall estate.

Prior to the commencement of this project, the building asset and management details were incomplete, stored in a variety of spreadsheets that were time-consuming to maintain, and sat in isolation from any other Estates information. 

The overall aim of the project was to drive towards total lifecycle asset management with improved reactive and proactive maintenance services and a “joined up” asset register with improved data quality and related building formation, available across all Estates departments.

The project commenced in July, 2017 with the following objectives being approved in Oct/Nov’17 (v1.3 of the Project Brief) by the Project Board:-

1. Proactively managing and mitigating any risks associated with the data migration and  activation of the Enterprise Asset Management module including:

   1. Environment Stability,  Resilience, and Storage Capacity
   2. Integrity
   3. Availability
   4. Live data change corruption or loss
   5. Reduction in user performance
2. Proactively identifying and managing any risks / impact to WebCentral to ensure smooth migration and implementations;
3. Deliver tested (system and user) mobile collected Asset Management data to the Live ARCHIBUS Environment;
4. Successfully complete and close off delivery of agreed in scope JIRAs;
5. Support migration of existing data (e.g Work Orders) within ARCHIBUS live environment to align with new asset data;
6. Support and agree scope for data cleansing;
7. Governance and prioritisation of emergent issues generated from EST098 which are agreed to be managed outside EST098;
8. Align project to Estates IS strategy and programme.

The initial scope originated from EST098 - Archibus Upgrade Project, where it was agreed that the collection of mobile asset data and any migration/integration of that data would be done under a separate project. 

The scope covered:-

1. Delivery of an offsite system solution that allowed the Estates Asset Management team to capture, record, and store the UoE 56 highest priority building’s assets (‘offsite’ due to the dependency on EST098 completion, to allow access to Live Archibus environment (S1);
2. Migration of the Mobile asset collection client template, to the Archibus environment (S2);
3. Migration of the captured asset data from the offsite environment to the Live Archibus environment (S3);
4. Delivery of the Enterprise Asset Management Module to the Live Archibus environment (S4)
5. Deliver JIRAS’s EST098-5, EST098-9, EST098-10, EST098-11, EST000-15, EST000-16, EST000-17, EST000-18, EST098-17 into Live Environment (S5).

During the project additional scope was added under formal change control procedures and change requests C5 and C8.  The detailed scope and delivery outcomes against each element of change are detailed in the table on page 6 below.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

The project was initially set up and run as an Estates led project.  Subsequently management was handed over to IS resource within the IS/Estates transformation team (July 2017).

Internally, only IS resources were budgeted for and costs tracked.

External supplier costs were managed via a process covering quotation requests, quotation receipt, business case generation, review and approval/rejection (Estates/IS Business Lead and Senior Supplier). 

Where necessary, project changes were raised to cover additional IS resource requirements and changes to key milestone delivery dates. These were managed under both project and IS (WIS) governance.

Final project lessons learned and closure activities are still to be accounted for c. 5 days.

Outcome

The project was set up under the management of Estates resource prior to being taken over by an IS resource, aligned to Estates.  Over the course of the project three different IS Project Managers managed the project.

From the approved Project Brief, the following deliverables were identified and the outcome achieved as follows:-

With regards the outcomes above, the CAFM Stabilisation Project (EST123) includes a work package to improve the documentation and processes associated with functional and user acceptance testing.  Further lessons including those associated with Change Management, the Deployment Process and enhanced knowledge across and between the IS Teams and Estates EBIS Support Team will also be addressed with EST123.

The following scope was delivered:

The following table provides a summary of the outcomes related to the JIRA’s (S5/C5):-

JIRA’s transferred to EST000 became out of scope of the project following agreement with the Project Sponsor.  For clarification, JIRA’s under EST000 were not actively managed from the point of transfer.

Explanation for variance

Much of the variance from the initial planning to the actual project spend has been caused by extensive facilitation and management activities together with continual repetition of preparation, planning, resource management and communications associated with the initial asset data migrations, JIRA’s and subsequently the implementation of the long term asset data capture solution. 

More specifically, variance has been caused by:

• Poor initial set up and lack of structured governance;
• Optimistic and incomplete planning based on lack of knowledge and understanding of the system capabilities and challenges that the heavily customised solution could provide;
• Initial lack of engagement of key SME resources meaning activities needed to be revisited and all parties brought up to speed;
• Poor requirements gathering/documentation from the initial business analysis which meant that the outcome was continually being revisited and work to enhance the output/’fill the gaps’ was needed;
• Poor system documentation of the existing solution and inconsistent understanding/knowledge of the system resulted in unexpected outcomes, which then had to be dealt with and resolved;
• Environment discrepancies across DEV, TEST and LIVE resulted in inconsistent test results requiring further investigations, solution creation/rectification, re-deployments and testing, all having a significant impact on the timeline and spent effort;
• Poor delivery time scales from the supplier, which meant repeated re-planning (internal resource groups) and additional control and management activities in line with Governance requirements which impacted time/effort;
• Increase in scope (under change control) including a Proof of Concept for Security Assets resulted in additional IS and Estates resource requirements;
• Repeated attempts to transfer the asset data from the off-site hosted database to the LIVE database due to unexpected errors caused by data synchronisation issues (building; floor; room).  This resulted in an initial roll back and a repeated attempt(s) to transfer, for which additional testing, planning and preparation activities were necessary;
• A necessary repeated requirement for asset data transfer from the off-site hosted database to the LIVE database, as the long-term asset data capture solution was not agreed, designed and delivered in readiness for the second major asset data gathering exercise;
• Resource availability challenges both within IS, Estates and Mass, which resulted in planned deployments necessarily being re-scheduled with the impact of repeated planning and preparation activities;
• Introduction of a new process to better govern system customisation/change requirements, meant business cases were then created for each JIRA request to enable better assessment and audit control, which took additional time/effort;
• Long-term asset data capture solution was not functionally tested by the supplier before being handed over for UAT.  As such a greater volume of errors were reported, required to be managed and re-tested, impacting time and effort.  The management of the error resolutions were not well structured or documented;
• Poor technical release documentation provided by the supplier and lack of collaboration to create deployment plans (across the team) meant that there was on-going confusion over requirements and the order of activities to be delivered;
• Challenge of working across many different parties and individuals, all with different working patterns and with different preferences/means for communicating impacted heavily on the facilitation and management time expended.  At times daily conference calls were scheduled, but not all resources attended, wasting time and effort;
• Confusing and at times, ineffective resource request process with associated poor communications meant a lot of facilitation and management time was expended to ensure resource availability and commitment.

Key Learning Points

A ‘Lessons Learned’ meeting was held on 12^th June, following the gathering of lessons from the majority of individual project team members.  Resources from Mass, Estates, IS Project Services and IS Production Management were in attendance.  The output from this meeting has been documented and is held in the EST099 Asset Management SharePoint library (here). 

A new CAFM Stabilisation project (EST123) will incorporate the majority of the actions from the Lessons Learned meeting, together with the ‘Explanation for Variance’ points above, to ensure improvements are made and embedded for future Estates projects. 

It is anticipated that some actions will also be addressed by the continued drive to implement control and governance standards as part of the IS/Estates Transformation Programme.  This includes lessons relating to better project initiation, handovers between key resources - there were ‘gaps’ (document control and website updates) and issues which arose given the changes in project management responsibility over the course of the project (4 Project Managers), and the ‘exclusion’ of key resources initially.  The IS/Estates Transformation Programme Guidance documentation is presently being written.

Outstanding Issues

The following outstanding issues exist:-

1. JIRA’s : EST099-1 (now EST000-24); EST099-4 (now EST000-22); EST099-5 (now EST000-15); EST099-6 (now EST000-27); EST099-8 (now EST000-26) as detailed in the above table;
2. The supplier has issued a resolution to the cursor ‘jumping’ issue on the mobile and is in TEST awaiting final sign off and promotion to LIVE.  There is an associated JIRA open (EST099-33);
3. Data cleansing/verification work and associated procedures are still on-going as part of business as usual wider lifecycle asset management activities and will also be given further consideration as part of the Data and Documentation Programme, within the wider Estates Transformation Programme.