Closure Report

Project Summary

Project commenced April 2017

The original scope and objectives of the project as defined in the Project Brief were as follows:

This project will deliver a business systems analysis of the processes and data required for the following assessments and rankings:

1. Intercalated Honours selection;
2. Foundation Application Educational Performance Measures;
3. Award of MBChB with Honours;
4. UK Clinical Aptitude Test (UKCAT);

The analysis will define the as-is and to-be processes, data, sources and systems required to support the above information needs.  It will recommend a technology choice for the preferred solution, and define the development and data migration projects required to deliver that solution.

The following were deemed out of scope:

• No other existing or planned types of assessments or rankings will be within the scope of this project. 
• However, it is assumed that the solution identified will be capable of extension to include other assessment rankings within the University’s College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine. 
• Stakeholders in Veterinary Medicine and in Biomedical Sciences will be informed of the project and solution, but will not be required to contribute objectives or requirements.

The project team delivered a business analysis report in February 2018 with proposals that Student Systems needed to evaluate in order to identify a solution that worked within Euclid. Unfortunately Student Systems did not have the capacity to resource this requirement, but agreed to prioritise this in the following academic year. Therefore, the decision was taken to suspend the project until then.

Project suspended May - September 2018

In late August, student services confirmed available resource, project services identified a new PM and BA and the project recommenced. MBChB were invited to review the scope, progress and revisit the requirements along with the new project team. As a result, aware that we should seek a cost effective and pragmatic solution to what was originally a very complex set of scenarios the team made a couple of clear decisions which were also influenced by MBChB migrating to APT and introducing several business process changes, partly as a consequence of this project.

Scope change

We recommended that the scope and direction of the project should be modified to reflect:-

• MBChB now utilised APT and had made several business process changes that the project team could explore and use beneficially
• the project had not been able to recommend, let alone deliver a solution
• MBChB had raised this as a priority concern, a manual activity that absorbed up to 120 days of effort

We were able to reduce the scope and focus on the following two report requirements:-

2. Foundation Application Educational Performance Measures;
3. Award of MBChB with Honours;

This decision meant that we would retain over 90% of the scenarios that MBChB initially requested. Item 1 had incredible complexity and was driving a costly and technically challenging solution that we felt had minimal merit. Item 4 has the potential to change, as MBChB have to respond to changing requests from UKCAT. Both decisions were approved by the Project team and the Project Sponsor.

https://secure.projects.ed.ac.uk/unpublished/project/mvm121/issues/10 PICCL covering the change of scope.

Project deliver a recommendation report January 2019 - approved February 2019

In order to deliver the new recommendation paper, the team ran several workshops to clearly understand the changed MBChB requirements. Pilot reports were created which helped us further develop this understanding. Following delivery of the paper, the project team clearly identified an option to take forward as our recommendation.

Philippa Burrell (MVM) then met Lisa Dawson (SSP) and agreed the following:-

• Proposal 3 is our recommended option (this option is using APT and BiSuite)
• The College will pay for the staff costs

• Students running out of the standard academic timeline (about 10 students a year) will be processed manually
• MTO will be using final course marks not individual assessment marks
• We will need BiSuite training for a couple of MTO staff to become Super Users and that they would be given Super User access
• The Vet School might need to have this facility, which would be possible with a few tweaks
• The Special Circumstances/Coursework Extension information will be available through APT once the SEP SA&S on SC/CE has been completed but until that point this information will need to be collated separately.
• The hand-over date would need to be June 2019 with a approx. timeline of: Early April: 1^st Testing End of April/Early May: Tweaks May: 2^nd Testing June: Handover

The above has been accepted by MVM and SSP.

A new project has been identified and is already being initiated, SSP have resourced two colleagues and approx. 40 days will be transferred from this project to the following.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

The original agreed budget of 50 days was subject to change under PICCL item #5.

Staff Usage Estimate: 130 days

Staff Usage Actual: 90 days

Staff Usage Variance: -25%

Other Resource Estimate: N/A

Other Resource Actual: N/A

Other Resource Variance: N/A

Outcome

The objectives have been met as follows:

With regards to the partial status reported against these deliverables, the project team took a pragmatic approach to a project that was late and needed to deliver. As such, rather than re-work significant analysis we developed a 'lite' delivery process. Process mapping and the system interfaces were delivered via process maps but there was no data model and definitions or data sources documented as such.  Additionally, business requirements were produced but not in the full BRD template document. MBChB also produced an example calculation and we ran several example scenarios to demonstrate the robustness of the solution in a new direction of travel.

However, the project team agreed that the outputs produced were sufficient to enable decisions to be made. 

Explanation for variance

The project encountered the following issues and was subject to the following change controls:

Ref	Date Identified	Type	Short Description	Governance Required	Date Completed
1	08-Jun-2017	Issue	Business Analysis Resource	No	20-Jun-2017	view
2	13-Jun-2017	Change	Change to end of planning milestone	No	13-Jun-2017	view
3	24-Jul-2017	Change	Change to end of analysis, and thereby project closure, milestone	Yes	01-Aug-2017	view
4	01-Aug-2017	Issue	Impact of data granularity & availability on analysis recommendation	No		view
5	28-Nov-2017	Change	Additional Data Modelling Resource	Yes	01-Dec-2017	view
6	20-Apr-2018	Issue	Change of project manager	No		view
7	25-Apr-2018	Change	Change of project milestones - delivery and closure.	No		view
8	01-Sep-2018	Decision	Project to be unsuspended	Yes	13-Sep-2018
9	01-Dec-2018	Change	Change to end of delivery and project closure milestones	No	10-Dec-2018
10	01-Dec-2018	Change	change of scope	No	10-Dec-2018

Key Learning Points

During the first phase of the project the team experienced issues around the following: (i) continuity of staffing; (ii) engagement with SSP; (iii) the absence of a dedicated solutions architecture function - which would have made the identification of technology options far easier and quicker.

Following the period of suspension, the project team included representation from SSP, development and MBChB. This combination has proven successful in delivering a clear recommendation and pilot.

mvm121_-_recommendation_paper.docx

mvm121_-_closure_report.pdf

It has been noted above, but following the suspension, the new team took a very different approach in order to try and deliver a solution that was workable for MBChB, but that also could be created as simply as possible. Removing EUCLID at that stage made eminent sense. We can see why the initial group targeted that solution, but given the time scales. local change within MBChB, the new team felt they could pragmatically find a sensible and cost effective alternative.

Outstanding Issues

All risks and issues closed. 

However, It is recommended that the MBChB team are provided training in line with the delivery of a solution, but that this will be implemented by the next project.

Attachment	Size
mvm121_-_recommendation_paper.docx	21.93 KB
mvm121 original closure report - for archive purposes	56.85 KB