Completion Report

Project Summary

The project was initiated in April 2016 as a compliance change to upgrade the PURE application database from Oracle 11g to Oracle 12c. Support for Oracle 11g was due to expire in October 2016. The brief was signed off in May 2016 and the project commenced. There was a backlog of patching to PURE that required to be implemented, and there were a number of dependencies that had to be in place before PURE could be migrated. These dependencies were -

  • Wiki and JIRA to be migrated to 12c first                  
  • RES60 (PGR Feed to PURE) successfully completing TEST phase                        
  • Implementing PURE v5.6 before the migration to 12c

A decision was taken in July 2016 that it was not going to be possible to deliver in the 15/16 year due to the dependencies, and that the project was to be suspended for two months. A further review in September 2016 concluded that there was too much activity planned for the start of 2017 for business areas and IS Apps to resource RES062, so the project suspension was extended further until January 2017. A review in January resulted in continuing the suspension until March 2017. This would allow the RES065 project (PURE Application Tier Upgrade - move to VMs) to complete as the application servers were end of life and the application TEST server had already failed. RES065 would also upgrade PURE on DEV, TEST and LIVE to v5.6.4-6.

The project restarted in June 2017 after RES065 closed, but there was an initial delay as there was no Dev Tech resource available for July, so the project was carried over into the 2016/17 year.  No patches were required for PURE and for Oracle, as PURE was now migrating to the latest Oracle 12.2 infrastructure.

Migration to DEV was carried out and signed off in September, and during October migration to TEST with integration testing and UAT signed off. During testing UWP carried out web service testing, and recorded that the data pull of the first 25 thousand records ran without issues and was 30 minutes quicker than on the old infrastructure.

The migration to LIVE was successfully carried out on 31st October 2017 with no failures in overnight jobs noted and the first of the month user generated reports ran fine too.

The redundant data structures for PURE-DEV, TEST and LIVE databases were removed after deployment sign off.

Objectives and Deliverables

Objective  -

 

Provide a supported version of PURE due to existing Oracle version (11g) currently undergoing an upgrade to 12c

 

 

D1.1

Upgrade  DEV

Achieved

D1.2

Upgrade Test

Achieved

D1.3

Upgrade Live

Achieved

D1.5

Test Plan

Achieved

D1.6 Benchmarking of performance before and after the Upgrade Achieved
D1.7 Decommission old database Achieved

 

All objectives and deliverables were achieved.

Scope

There was no scope change throughout the project.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 52 days

Staff Usage Actual: 68 days

Staff Usage Variance: 30%

Explanation for variance:

The original budget for the project was approved as 45 days (20 days 15/16 and 25 days 16/17)

As the project ran for longer than expected:

  • started in 2015/16
  • suspended in 2016/17 for ten months
  • restarted in 2016/17 with a new project manager and team
  • and ran into 2017/18. 

The change of team had an effect on the budget, as there was familiarisation and catch up period to allow the project to pick up momentum.

  • Budget for 2016/17 was 29 days
  • Budget for 2017/18 was 10 days

Due to not being able to use the allocated project days in 2016/17 due to resource availability during June and July, the project did not use all of the 29 days remaining in the 2016/17 year, and as this was not carried over into 2017/18, an additional 20 days was required in 2017/18 to complete the project.

Key Learning Points:

  • Issue - Project was started then suspended.

    • Key Learning Point - Review the milestone dates at the start of the project (brief sign off stage) in conjunction with any key dependencies, and resource availability if they are known at the time. This will give an indication of whether the project will be able to deliver to the agreed original milestones, or if starting it should be postponed.
  • Issue - For financial year 17/18, a PURE Upgrade Roadmap for the RIS Programme has been created to highlight the key activity to reach mock REF in November 2018.
    • Key Learning Point - The PURE Upgrade Roadmap should also be kept updated with any Infrastructure / Application upgrades if these are not already reflected in the roadmap.
  • Issue - Previous testing scripts were too specific, it only tested the REF functionality.
    • Key Learning Point - Update the scripts to include all  functionality like Open Access compliance testing before and after the upgrade.

Outstanding issues:

There are no outstanding issues.

AttachmentSize
PDF icon pure_upgrade_roadmap_2016-19.pdf250.99 KB

Project Info

Project
PURE Upgrade to Oracle 12c
Code
RES062
Programme
Research Information Systems (RIS)
Management Office
ISG PMO
Project Manager
Chris Konczak
Project Sponsor
Dominic Tate
Current Stage
Close
Status
Closed
Start Date
06-Apr-2016
Planning Date
n/a
Delivery Date
n/a
Close Date
08-Dec-2017
Programme Priority
2
Overall Priority
Normal
Category
Compliance