Completion Report

Were the project goals met? Were the project deliverables fully or partially accomplished?

The objectives of this project were:

• To prioritise and implement as many enhancement suggestions as can be achieved within the limited budget. It is accepted that it will not be possible to develop all of the enhancement suggestions within the budget, in which case those which will not be delivered will be moved out of scope.

The deliverables of this project were:

• A prioritised list of enhancement suggestions
• Updated functions delivered to LIVE for as many of those enhancement suggestions which have been prioritised as can be accommodated within the budget and timescales.

The above objectives and deliverables have been delivered, and there are multiple improved areas of functionality now available to personal tutors, senior tutors and student support officers. The enhancements delivered are:

• Student Disability Services systems updated to reflect the new Personal Tutor system where previously it was Director of Studies (systems Kelso and Radium).
• Full student record can be opened in a new tab rather than a pop-up to allow users to open multiple records at the same time.
• Ability to select students, and to be able to generate a single email to all selected students at once, giving the ability for a Personal Tutor to email all their students at one time.
• Re-working of the Personal Tutor view to include:
  • "Actions" for students, and in the actions to have a Confirmation of Attendance button. When a student has not confirmed their attendance the actions is highlighted in red, to indicate to the Personal Tutor that an action is to be taken, making it easy for Personal Tutors to see where they should follow up with a Personal Tutee. This enables the Personal Tutor to add a note and confirmation of attendance from one place.
  • "More" to give quick access to additional functions - currently the link to the support team details for that student and a link to online course enrolment, and a mechanism to add further quick links in future.
• Inclusion of the student email address into the request meeting notification email. For example this enables Personal Tutors who are reading the notification on a mobile phone to directly email the student from their mobile, without going through EUCLID.
• Within the 'add note, meeting & comment' functions the user sometimes had to scroll to see the save button, depending on the screen that they used. They would at the same time see a close button, but this would just close the window without saving (due to the content of the window being ColdFusion and the window being EUCLID). This was thought to contribute to perception that Personal Tutors were 'losing' notes when in fact on checking teh logs they had not saved them in the first place. The Save button is now on a floating bar, and so is always visible on the screen without scrolling, which will encourage users to save the notes without simply closing.
• The ability for use of pre-populated text which can be added to the notes facility - standard text relating to confidentiality of discussions was agreed at the Senior Tutors Network and SSIG, and users can now select the standard text from a drop-down for inclusion in the notes.
• The ability for SACS to add new items of pre-populated text once it is agreed - for example standard text in relation to a) students not turning up to scheduled meetings, and b) if a student chooses to decline a meeting as they consider it unnecessary, is currently being discussed at the Senior Tutors Network and once agreed will be able to be added by SACS without further development.
• Some users were seeing two scroll bars on the right hand side of the notes functions, which related primarily to the size of screen they were using. This has been minimised through an amendment which has enabled most standard screens to now display only one scroll bar, but small screens (or users resizing the window) will still occasionally show two scroll bars.
• Code changes were deployed into TRN as part of SSG007.

Did the project deliver a solution to the problems being addressed? Have the desired operational results been achieved?

The success criteria were that the project will be successful if:

• Priorities of suggested enhancements can be determined
  • Please see this document for the process and the priorities.
• Clear requirements to enable the development and testing of the suggested enhancements can be provided ahead of the build starting (note that if requirements are not clear then development build of lower priority work whose requirements are clear may start - this may mean that higher priority enhancements are not implemented if the budget or time runs out and must be borne in mind).
  • The issue tracking tool jira was used to capture the requirements for each enhancement, and in the majority of enhancements these were clear before the build started.
• As many prioritised suggested enhancements as can be implemented within the budget before Christmas 2012 are complete and LIVE before Christmas 2012.
  • A number of enhancements were implemented before Christmas 2012, however there was budget remaining and it was agreed that the delivery could be extended to April 2013.This was because of prioritisation of other work, and no hard deadline for the enhancements.

Were additional results achieved besides the original success criteria? Were there any unforeseen benefits delivered by this project?

In addition to the original success criteria the project enabled two members of application support to build skills in developing the small enhancements using ColdFusion, giving them an understanding of the development process and an improved ability to support the application in future.

Does the Project Sponsor agree that this project can be closed at this time?

The project sponsor has agreed to close SSG007. The deployment of this project covered both SSG007 and SSG004.