Completion Report

Project Summary

The project benefited from being a well-understood process carried out by an experienced team.

There were no delays other than those cause by external factors (such as key project team members to work on a higher-priority project).

Project team members worked over the weekend of March 18-19 to ensure the LIVE service was upgraded with minimal disruption to the business.

Deliverables

All deliverables were achieved:

Benefits

All the expected benefits were delivered:

• Student Record system remains within the standard support contract with SITS supplier Tribal 
• Access to new functionality in new version
• Automated performance testing on LIVE will allow comparisons of performance before and after implementing changes on LIVE.

Success Criteria

All the success criteria were achieved:

• Minimum disruption to LIVE service during upgrade.
  • The LIVE service was unavailable to users from mid-day on Friday 17th March and released back to users earlier than advertised, on Sunday 19th March 
• Few open issues , and quick resolution of any critical issues in DEV / TEST, TRN and LIVE - as these could impact other project work and testing  in DEV and TEST,  and training in TRN, and will impact live users in the LIVE environment.
• Minimum impact on downstream systems.
  • No impact reported
• No long term degradation in the performance of the service.
  • Performance indicators to date indicate performance is acceptable
• Read-only automated performance test can be run  regularly on LIVE

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate:  IS: 210 days

Staff Usage Actual: 207 days

• Project Services: 17 days
• Student Systems Partnership Development: 62 days
• Development Technology: 95 days
• Applications Management: 23 days
• Technology Management: 5 days
• Director's Office: 2 days

Staff Usage Variance: -1.5%

Explanation for variance:

Although more effort  was spent in refreshing the DUST environment than had been planned, the project team worked efficiently and there were few issues encountered during the upgrade which fell within the cope of this project to address. The contingency days  assigned to the project did not have to be used and will be returned to the programme.

Key Learning Points:

1. Check each environment is working as expected before refresh, or it will be unclearthe if the refresh has caused issues or if they were pre-existing issues. E.G. DUST  certificate had expired .

2. In  upgrade to 9.2.0 we had an issue with the MEN_FIX program running very slowly.   We have noted how to deal with this for future reference.

3. The project team should clearly   note and seek approval for a change of scope should any change  be proposed to alleviate an existing issue, particularly if this results in a change to previous processes. (See below)

4. As in previous years, the  streams refresh process was a significant claim on project time . Finding an alternative process is being discussed  within the IS SSP dev team.

5. The project benefited from having  an experienced team carrying out a well-understood process, who worked well together. Thus although the project was delayed (due to loss of key resources to higher priority work),   the team was able to adapt and the  delay did not have significant impact upon the project

Outstanding issues:

There are no outstanding issues related to the upgrade of the software. During user acceptance testing, several existing issues were highlighted.  

Existing issues requiring workarounds for project to succeed

Filestore locking

IS Apps staff do not have the permissions to break file locks since the decommissioning of MIS-BUFFY which has been replaced by a server supplied by research services.  

If files are locked there is a requirement to be able to do this during the upgrade  or the upgrade will fail. As Research Services could not guarantee cover out of hours,  and a means by which IS Apps staff could break locks could not be agreed and delivered in time, the team tested a new process (in TRN) which could be used in the event of a file being locked. This was not needed during the LIVE upgrade but the project team recommends that this process is used in future upgrades, at an additional cost of 1-2 days to the project.

The process is described in the attached document and is available on the wiki. At this date this is the recommended solution.

However, the head of production has stated  that a means of breaking locks will  be available by the time the next upgrade completes.

Client Crashes

Some project effort was spent in investigating these in order to confirm that the upgrade had not exacerbated these issues.   Using the SITS  launcher improved the user experience but the Project Manager has agreed with the head of Production that  the business should record the incidents of client crashes in Unidesk so that Production can take the investigation forward outwith the project. (I170512-0695)

Duplicate matching issues

The following issues are to be addressed in a forthcoming software update which will be applied as part of the normal business process. These JIRA issues will be closed and no further action taken by the project.

https://www.jira.is.ed.ac.uk/browse/SAC058-68

https://www.jira.is.ed.ac.uk/browse/SAC058-63