Closure Report

Project Summary

The Student Funding project was the result of a merger of two individual projects: the Scholarship Project, this aimed to deliver an application process embedded within Euclid together with a tool to enable scholarship administrators to review applications, maintain application decisions and notify applicants on outcome; the Funding Project, there was a need for all funding administered within the University to be recorded centrally, within Euclid, and the information made available across the University.

Due to a lack of available resources during project delivery, there was no resource assigned to deliver the documented processes, framework, and web guidance for the implemented systems and as such  an SSP BA is performing all support activities in relation to the systems delivered.

The objective of this piece of work is to ensure closure of The Student Funding Project with the required documented processes, framework, procedures and relevant training and communication. 

Were the project goals met? 

Yes, they were fully met.

The SSP BA resource is no longer performing support activities and has been released to resume BA activities on SSP projects.

Objectives and Deliverables Achieved

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: No development effort required. BA time only partially recorded

Outcome

Explanation for variance

Initial approach to delivery, with BA providing knowledge and other resources delivering documentation, was not successful. The quality and level of detail was not sufficient for Student Systems Operations staff to work from. New approach was then taken.

Key Learning Points

• What went well?

Identifying that the BA required ring fenced time in order to complete and deliver all requirements, once the decision was taken to allow the BA to complete all tasks without the demand on time from any additional project work, resulted in high quality documentation being delivered. 

• What didn't go so well?

Initially it was hoped that the BA could provide knowledge to resources who would subsequently deliver an acceptable level of documentation for handover. This approach was not successful and the decision was made to permit the BA to  progress with documentations, guidance and  handover

• If you had a project like this again, what would you improve?

It is the intention going forward that no future projects will be implemented without being fully resourced and thus all documentation and guidance will be complete on project delivery. This will ensure a follow up project will never be required. 

Outstanding Issues

BI reporting : A Scholarships summary report has been delivered (Scholarships - Summary Report Freehand) This will display the required data for all applicants and students who have an offer of scholarship. At the time of closure due to resourcing this report will need a minor manual intervention annually to update the hard coded date that the report runs on.  Additional reports were to be completed to provided a bespoke view of this summary data however due to resourcing and conflict of other work priorities these have not been produced. It has been requested by Jennifer Brown that these be recommended for future Continuous Improvement work.