Completion Report
Project Summary:
Project Deliverables
All deliverables were achieved
| 1 | Documented standard operating procedure for purging specified eFinancials data. | M | Achieved |
| 2 | Method to store purged eFinancials data for later retrieval. | M | Achieved |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Documented standard operating procedure for archiving purged eFinancials data. | M | Achieved - done at same time as purge |
| 4 | Provision of agreed User Acceptance Test plan. | M | Not delivered to PM but used by FIS |
| 5 | Testing of purging and archiving procedures within eFinancials against User Acceptance Test plan. | M | Achieved |
| 6 | Implementation of ABS fixes to the DEV, TEST and LIVE environments as required. | M | Achieved |
| 7 | Simple process for querying archived data. | HD | Achieved |
| 8 | Proof of concept based on delivered standard operating procedure by archiving one of the ledgers/sub-ledgers in the LIVE environment. | M | Achieved |
| 9. | Document results of purging routine testing, including any issues reported to ABS. | HD | Achieved |
| 10. | A rollback procedure for immediate reversal of a purge event, to be carried out by IS Applications. | M | Achieved |
Success Criteria
These success criteria were all achieved:
- Delivery of a purging and archiving methodology operating in the live environment which supports the purging of any records from eFinancials without impacting system integrity and which can be used at any pre-planned time to perform record purging..
- Purging of records on eFinancials does not affect the operational information needed by the sales or purchase ledgers and information is still summarised in the general ledger
- Successful reconciliation of data purged to ensure security of records archived.
- The purging of a set of records from eFinancials which proves the process.
- A new database created to allow querying and reporting on archived transactions
- Testing of all purging programmes within the eFinancials DEV and TEST environment and recording of any issues noted
Additional Benefits
The team noted the additional benefit that this new functionality had been added without creating an additional system. Maintenance has thus been minimised.
- The purging and archiving is done via efinancials
- The reporting is done via BI
Future Developments
The archiving facility is planned to be in use for only two years. After this time Finance will be able to confirm the reliability of the ABS purging procedures and there will no longer be a need for archiving purged data.
The archiving facility might be improved by a small enhancement which could be picked up by a future project:
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 63 days
Staff Usage Actual: 71 days
Staff Usage Variance: 13%
Other Resource Estimate: 1 days
Other Resource Actual: 1 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
Initial Proposal Underestimated
The initial proposal suggestion (40 days) was underestimated as the scope and requirements were not sufficiently understood in order to estimate the effort required to deliver them. No contingency was allocated.
The planning and analysis stages took 22 days to complete because the deliverables were initially unclear and once agreed, investigations revealed the complexity of the steps required to achieve the deliverables. These had not beenundestood at the proposal stage. The project was re-estimated at that stage as requiring an additional 21 days to complete with the assistance of the supplier.taking the estimate to 63 days. The project manager then confirmed the scope with the project sponsor and additional funding was agreed.
Issues with reconciliation of Purged vs Archived data
The project team worked with the supplier in order to adapt existing supplier scripts to deliver the full requirements. The build sign off could not be achieved when expected due to disparities between the data archived (using scripts developed with the supplier) and the data purged (using the existing supplier scripts. Additional effort was required to resolve these issues and achieve the build review.
Extended duration
The duration of the project was extended for several reasons:
- initial business lead retired
- annual leave of IS Applications staff delayed
- annual leave of FIS staff delayed beginning of UAT
- delay in approving new budget and milestones
- change in project scope resulted delay to completion of UAT testing
- delay in agreement of deployment signoff and closure milestones
- delay in getting access to BI designer to create BI universe
- delay in access to BI test to check data ( a licensing issue)
Key Learning Points:
Non-standard design and development
The team worked with ABS to understand how the existing ABS purging scripts worked, so that the requirements for archiving the purged data could be understood, agreed and documented.
The support analyst then worked with ABS to produce the archiving scripts which were required to be used in tandem with the existing ABS archiving scripts.
As these procedures were non-standard, the team had to adapt the usual internal QA procedures but there was less internal peer review and oversight than is usual.
In order to gain best value from the ABS resource, the work was sometimes carried out on-site and followed up via email. When on-site the ABS resource split effort between the project and ongoing work for FIS.
The project team consider that working with ABS was successful but recommend that:
- For similar future work an ABS resource should be booked on-site and dedicated to project work.
- The ABS resource should be on-site for testing
- The risk to the budget of working with a consultant should be assessed and recorded, particularly if the consultant resource is not dedicated while on-site - for example the risk that the requirements may not be fully understood by the consultant
Outstanding issues:
Internal FIS Documentation
IS Applications have provided all documents required for this to be competed by FIS as agreed.
https://www.jira.is.ed.ac.uk/browse/FIN097-9