Overview

Background

University of Edinburgh Estates have a rolling 10 year capital programme in the region of £1.4bn.  This level of demand has required an increase of operational scale across personnel, processes, cultures and systems. 

Estates currently achieve management of capital projects and management of the capital plan using an array of spreadsheets.

• The current tools are not scalable
• The current tools do not allow efficient management above project level and make rolling up to programme/portfolio level difficult
• It is time consuming to report at any level other than project - for example, campus, building, school
• Multiple locations for the same data

Analysis performed by Estates development team, in liaison with Price Waterhouse Coopers. (PWC) in March 2016 made a number of recommendations, summarised below.

• Additional management capacity will be required to cope with the increased volume of work that will be required of the Estates Department;
• Processes will be required that allow the Estates Department’s leadership to oversee the capital programme as a programme, rather than a collection of individual projects, and key day-to-day project management activities, for example reporting, should be streamlined;
• Investment in systems and tools will be required to allow the Estates Department to plan and manage the capital programme effectively; and
• A programme-based approach to governance will be required to ensure that oversight and scrutiny is focused on the right areas

Overview of Solution

EST102 Estates EPPM Procurement project selected PPM Anywhere as the EPPM solution for Estates.  The contract was finalised on 22^nd June 2018.  PPM Anywhere is provided as Software as a Service (SaaS), hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Software:  PPM contains a number of "modules":  Project Management, Programme Management, Portfolio Management, Time Management, Demand Management, Financial Management, Reporting and Dashboards.  Clients need internet access; desktop/laptop with 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM; A supported Browser (MS Internet Explorer; Mozilla Firefox; Chrome).  There are no components specific to an O/S and no plug-ins or extensions.  The user can combine use of MS Project, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat with using PPM Anywhere.  Access is role based with roles definition and configuration under UoE control. User access management processes and ownership are to be defined as part of this project.  Authentication can be managed through Single Sign On and integration with the University’s EASE system is desirable.

Infrastructure:  SaaS, each customer on virtual private cloud, on AWS.  We will host all data within EU both live (AWS Ireland) and failover (AWS Netherlands).  We will have 3 environments – Production, Pre-production and Development/Test with additional sandpit environments available if required.  Non production environments are separated from production for protection of Route to Live.  Application and Database servers are separate.  The database holds both application data and configuration.  Backups are copied to mirrored storage.  Data Redundancy allows recovery to the last transaction committed.  Expected and agreed availability:  24 X 7 @ 99.9%

Support:  Standard Incident Support & patch maintenance is included in the annual licence fee.  The annual fee is related to the number of licences in use.  Estates have contracted to purchase 25 advanced licences for the first 3 years.  Polarisoft provide a support portal where incidents can be raised, updated and tracked. We will provide named contacts for support.  Incidents are classified with attendant response and target resolution times: 5 levels from Critical to Low.  There will be quarterly reviews of service with our Account Manager and a monthly report against SLAs.  Their support team consists of 6 staff based in London and USA.  Our support staff will be provided with test/dev environment for replicating problems, training materials, super user training and release notes.  Other environments can be made available on request to sandpit major changes, integrations or new modules.

Strategic Alignment

• The project aligns with UoE technical principles as incorporated UoE Service Excellence, Digital Transformation and Core Systems programs;
• The project aligns with Estates IS Strategy defined in Estates Business Vision May ’18 v1.3.
• The project aligns with ITIL methodology and aims to deliver business transformation, with a new operating model that supports the new business processes and tools, to ensure “whole-life” solution stability, and a continuous improvement management cycle.
• The project contributes to defining and adopting a reusable approach to be applied to all projects in the Estates IS Portfolio.

Scope

The project will implement PPM Anywhere as the selected solution capable of supporting the Estates Department to deliver a £1.4bn capital building works plan over the next 10 years by enabling management of complex portfolios of projects.

Objectives

1. Technical configuration and implementation management of the solution to meet Estates business goals.
2. Estates Project Managers and other users are trained and able to operate the software so they can manage Estates projects more effectively and efficiently.
3. Transition and handover of a stable, supportable solution to a business-as-usual (BAU) support team.

Deliverables

Benefits

• The capability to efficiently and effectively present a range of capital planning scenarios will support more sophisticated and evidence-based management decision making when considering the delivery of the capital plan;
• A single ‘source of truth’ of expenditure, funding and progress across all projects by school, college or campus will provide more complete, accurate and transparent information on expenditure profile, funding sources and progress status of projects for stakeholders;
• A standardised and auditable set of processes and procedures for managing programmes and projects will provide enhanced governance to the delivery of the Capital Programme projects enabling greater visibility of costs, risks and use of resource.
• A standardised approach for requirements gathering, prioritisation, technical options definition, design and build, implementation and transition data migration and delivery of end state support and service management operating model

Success Criteria

Project milestones

Phase 1 of the project will deliver configuration of PPMA delivering the bulk of the required business functionality (Programme Management, Cost Management, Capital Planning & Portfolio Management), the SaaS environments, IS technical delivery of integrations (eFIN, SharePoint, SSO), training and establishment of a support service, defined by transition plans and target operating model

Phase 2 of the project will be concerned with delivery of configuration of PPMA to deliver business functionality around Project Management and additional business readiness activities to ensure the users can leverage that.  IS involvement is expected to be limited to project services (PM & BA).  There is no expectation of further IS technical build in this phase.  However, major change activity has been anticipated and an additional project is in plan to embed and optimise emergent requirements in the end state solution.  This project will be EST104.

Link to Project Website Milestone Log:  https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/unpublished/project/est103/milestones