Closure Review
Project Summary:
Contributors
Role | Department | Name |
Project Manager (Owner)/ Programme Manager | IS Applications | Nikki Stuart |
Production Management Coordinator | IS Applications | Ana Heyn |
Technical Architect | IS Applications | Gillian Henderson |
Developer - Configuration Team | IS Applications | Alyson Shaw |
Business Area Manager - Payroll | Payroll Office | Kathy Chappell |
Business Area Manager - Pensions | Pensions Office
| Ann Banks |
Business Area Manager - HR
| HR Systems Team | Susan McLaren |
Project Sponsor - HR | HR | Lindsay Miller |
Project Sponsor - FIS | FIS | Gordon Forbes (previously Pamela Blair) |
Project Review
Objectives and Deliverables
No | Description | New or Changed (Y/N) |
O1 | Oracle HR System is upgraded in Live before 31st October 2012 | N |
D1 | Upgrade Oracle from 11.5.10 to at least R12.1 | N |
D2 | Upgrade Oracle Database to 11G | N |
In addition to the above the following we delivered by the project;
- recompiled Oracle Forms in Forms v10
- APEX reports for Transport Loans and Sickness Absence reporting
Scope
The ToR documented the following as In scope
- To implement the recommendations produced from HRS067 on DEV TEST and LIVE environments
- Any pre-upgrade training which is identified as necessary and had not yet been completed.
- To implement Load balancing and resilience. The application infrastructure is changing with the introduction of an extra application server. The concurrent manager is being moved from the DB server to the application server to allow the application to be more resilient
All of the above were delivered as agreed by the project.
Schedule
The Project Milestones outlined in teh ToR and the actual sign off dates for each phase are provided in the table below;
Milestone | Original ToR Milestone | Actual Milestone date | Reason for any Variance |
Planning | 31/10/11 | 31/10/11 | N/A |
Design | 05/12/11 | 11/12/11 | Minor delay to accommodate short resource conflict (See PICCL 4) |
Build - Upgrade | 23/03/12 | 11/06/12 | Resource conflicts with eRecruitment, Tax Year End and eTime (see PICCLs 7, 8 & 9) Technical issues were encountered during the DEV build (See PICCLs 12, 13, 14, 15, 17 & 18) |
Build - Apex | no milestone | 23/11/13 | This was de-coupled from the upgrade build and the priority for this task reduced due to conflicts with developer and eRecruitment and the Forms issue for the upgrade. (See PICCLs 20, 24 & 25 and from the new Projects Website Items 2, 3 and 6) |
Integrartion | 27/06/12 | removed | The integration milestone was removed from the project as it did not fit with an upgrade |
Acceptance - Upgrade | 27/08/12 | 15/10/12 | Delayed due to key testers leave (See PICCL 24) |
Acceptance - Apex | no milestone | 11/01/13 | As with the Apex Build milestone this was not included in the ToR as this work had to be separated from the main upgrade due to resource conflicts. (See PICCLs 20, 24 & 25 and from the new Projects Website Items 2, 3 and 6) |
Delivery | 25/10/12 | 06/11/12 | The original ToR date did not fit with the payroll dates and it was agreed that the upgrade should be moved to between 1st and 6th November (See PICCL 20) |
Deployment Sign Off | 27/11/12 | 18/01/13 | Post LIVE issues required to be resolved by resource conflicts with the HR HESA and Oracle Annual Maintenance projects delayed these final tasks (see Item 10) |
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 292 days
Staff Usage Actual: 390 days
Staff Usage Variance: 34%
Other Resource Estimate: days
Other Resource Actual: days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
The variance of the project estimate from ToR estimate (292 days) to the actual effort used (390 days) can be attributed to either work that took longer than estimated or work that was not included in the oroginal estimate.
- Work where additional days were needed from the ToR Estimate ;
- Issues during the Build phase to establish the DEV environment and undertake the DEV upgrade increased the estimate by 30 days (see PICCLS 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 22) - inc of 30 days
- The APEX work increased from 17 days to 21 days - inc of 4 days
- The forms tasks increased from 9 days to 18 days due to issues with setting up the virtual environment and recompiling in Forms 10 - inc of 9 days
- The LIVE upgrade required additional effort to complete – 3 days
- Additional PM days – 5.5 days
- Additional effort for DR and Operational documentation – 1.5 days
- Post Live issues – 9 days
- Work that was not included in the ToR estimate;
- Interfaces were not documented in the investigation and not included in the estimate – 14 days effort (investigation, testing and updates for DEV/TEST/LIVE)
- APEX training was not included in estimate (3 days Gillian and 5 days Alyson) - 8 days effort
- Event Bookings Interface not identified from investigation and urgent action had to be taken to allow this service to continue during the upgrade downtime – 2 days effort
- Manager Self Service had customisations that were not identified till near the end of UAT – 4 days effort
- Business Continuity documement was not included in the original estimate - 7 days effort
- Two HESA forms and additional reports needed recompiling over and above those identified in the original estimate, identified during UAT – 3 days effort
- Replicate required database level access to allow Payroll and HR to run required Sql reports against the database - 3 days
Key Learning Points:
- The length of time required to undertake the initial upgrade in the development environment was underestimated. Issues were identified that required Oracle input and the delays on waiting for supplier responses was not factored in to the plan. In total the build phase (for the development upgrade) took 3 months longer than originally planned. This did not impact the project significantly as there was sufficient lag in the plan before the hard milestone, however, this could have caused a major problem should this have not been the cause.
Lesson - When planning consider adding additional time for suppliers responding to issues.
- Due to the large number of unknowns prior to the project a scoping project was carried out. The scoping project only reviewed the data interfaces that were established through Cron's and not any database links. It is estimated that this work required 14 days effort to identify and collate all relevant data. The actual time required to update and test the database link changes was minimal. Consideration should be made when conducting scoping studies to every aspect of the system being reviewed.
Lesson - Scoping Studies should consider every aspect of the future project in detail.
- The project success was in part due to the dedicated resource that was provided from Development Technology. Where issues were experienced with losing other resources to other projects having a dedicated team for part of the project could have reduced this impact.
Lesson - Projects with a hard milestone should have a dedicated project team for all or part of the project.
Outstanding issues: