Completion Report
Project Summary:
The Project Brief stated that the project sought to deliver the following enhancements to the HR extract to PURE:
1. Handling of approx 200 "missing persons", who exist on the Finance extract but have no match on the HR extract
2. Modification to the settng of the Continuous Service Start Date, per requirement clarification
3. Resetting of the Retirement Date to null, per the recent UK legislative change
4. Addition of new Fixed Term Contract fields
5. Investigation of missing Org details matches for the Person sync
The Project Brief also noted that Atira must provide the new Fixed Term Contract fields in the PURE system, and that these must be in place before the HR extract changes are deployed. GaSP colleagues coordinated the Atira work.
Deliverable 5 - missing Org details matches - was resolved early in the project's development stage.
Following the development of Deliverable 4 - new Fixed Term Contract fields - the requirements were changed to leave only the new Fixed Term Contract Flag. As a result, the code changes that had been applied for the Fixed Term Contract dates had to be removed.
Deliverables 2, 3 and the updated Deliverable 4 - Continuous Service Start Date, Retirement Date, and Fixed Term Contract Flag - were all high priority changes. As a result, these were taken forward together. They were successfully delivered to Live on 14th December 2012.
This leaves Deliverable 1 - handling the "missing persons", who exist on the Finance extract but have no match on the HR extract. Code for this had previously been published as far as Test, but was found to run for 30 hours, while returning no results. This code was reviewed, and has been updated to complete within a couple of minutes. But the match for these people is based on both person id and organisational unit, and still results in no new matches. The Business Area Manager suggested that these people could be successfully retrieved if the match on organisational unit were dropped - i.e. by matching solely on person id. The person's most recent organisational unit from their HR record would then be passed in the extract to PURE. However, the Systems Analyst is concerned that this might have an unforeseen knock-on effect on the Funding sync. This issue therefore requires further thought, but the Systems Analyst is now unavailable. It has therefore been agreed that this item be removed from this project's scope, and returned to project RES037. The issue was originally logged under that project - see RES037-266. Upon closure of RES043, any remaining budget days will be transferred to RES037, to cover the effort required to resolve this issue.
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 33 days
Staff Usage Actual: 31.5 days
Staff Usage Variance: -5%
Other Resource Estimate: 0 days
Other Resource Actual: 0 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
Key Learning Points:
Following UAT sign-off in the Beta environment, the code changes were deployed to the Test environment. However, it was not possible to re-test the HR extract in Test, because - at the time - the HR Test database was disabled, pending re-cloning from Live HR. Ideally, this would have resulted in the re-testing being rescheduled for after the Test HR database had been re-started. However, the corresponding PURE upgrade was scheduled to be deployed to Live the following day, and the two deployments were interdependent. The risk of going Live without completing integration re-testing was explained to, and accepted by, the Business Owners. A number of issues were encountered during the Live deployment. All of these were resolved, and the Implementation Plan was updated and the code commented, to ensure that these issues do not recur in future deployments. However, it is recommended that in future any Live deployments should be delayed until UAT re-testing sign-off has been confirmed in the Test environment. (This is in accordance with the project methodology.)
Outstanding issues:
As mentioned above, Deliverable 1 - the issue logged under Jira RES037-266 - will be returned to project RES037 for further consideration.