Closure Review

Project Summary:

Contributors

Project Review

Objectives and Deliverables

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

1. To implement the recommendations produced from HRS067 on DEV TEST and LIVE environments
2. Any pre-upgrade training which is identified as necessary and had not yet been completed.
3. 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; 

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. 

1. 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  

2.  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:

1. 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. 

2. 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. 

3. 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: