Project Planning Meeting - 29th October 2012

Present:  Manya Buchan, James Toon, Defeng Ma, Jill Nicoll

Agenda:

1.  Review consolidated package for UAT testing:

• the HR extract enhancement for the Fixed Term Contract fields
• the HR extract enhancement for the removal of the Retirement Date (I120920-0694)
• the HR extract bug fix for Employee Start Date (I120406-0618)
• the resolved Gaby code, which handles the 200-odd "missing persons"

 (See System Design Spec, linked at https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/res043/system_design)

2.  Confirm delivery dates for Atira changes (required as prerequisites for Fixed Term Contract changes).

3.  Agree UAT testing timescale and delivery milestone.  (Note that no further changes to the HR extract can be considered until the four items in this package have been tested, signed off, and deployed to Live.) 

Meeting Note:

1. HR Extract changes:

Defeng explained that the four changes listed above are not yet available for UAT testing.  This is due to an urgent conflict for Alyson’s time last week and this week, to support the Live deployment of the HR R12 upgrade. 

There was some discussion on the “missing persons” code.

• Defeng to check that this code checks for matches in the VRS system as well as HR. 
• Defeng to ask Greg to remove Org Unit from the search parameters. 

This match should simply be on the Person id. 

The extract should simply take the Org Unit of the person’s most recent Assignment record.

• Defeng to ask Greg to provide Manya with a “plain English” description of the “missing persons” code.

In addition to the above, Defeng also wants Alyson to look at an issue with the Person sync.  This is issuing warnings that the sync can’t find matching Org details for certain HR records.

2.  Atira changes:

2.1  Atira have confirmed to Manya that the Fixed Term Contract start date can be provided with manual over-ride functionality

2.2  Atira have confirmed to Manya that it’s okay to return a null value for the Retirement Date field

2.3  Manya confirmed that the Atira change to add the new Fixed Term Contract flag field has already been applied, in release 414.0, to the Beta environment.

No new fields have been added for the Fixed Term Contract start or end dates.  These data elements are instead being populated into the existing Affiliation start and end dates.

Manya indicated that she would prefer two new fields to be added to the PURE system and the UoE HR extract for the Fixed Term Contract start or end dates.  This would allow the Affiliation start and end dates to remain in place, while the new fields would show the Fixed Term Contract dates.

Manya will organise this with Atira. 

• No in-house code changes to be made until Manya has confirmed to the project team that the new fields will be provided by Atira.

** NO sync may be run in Beta until further notice ** 

• This is to prevent the existing Affiliation start and end date fields from being over-written with Fixed Term Contract dates
• To support UAT testing in the absence of a sync, Config Team to provide csv downloads of the HR extract.

3.  Timescales

It is hoped that Alyson will be able to pick up the Peer Testing at the end of this week.  However, while the requirements for the Fixed Term Contract date fields remain uncertain, it will not be possible to confirm a release date for UAT.

Manya indicated that the priority items were the three Compliance requirements, i.e. the Fixed Term Contract fields, the Employee Start Date fix, and the null Retirement Date.  However, all changes to the HR extract are bundled together, and will be progressed to Test & Live together.

4.  AOCB

Jill reported that she had just taken over from Adam as project manager of the HR Extract project.

This project was raised with a proposal budget of 15 days, but this has already been overtaken.  The increase is partly due to increased scope (investigation and resolution of the “missing Person” code, and the pending investigation into the Person sync warnings), and partly due to the learning curve of a new Config Team analyst. 

Manya agreed to increasing the budget, since the project covers REF requirements.  The increase will be taken from the Programme budget.

5.  Actions: