Completion Report
Project Summary:
Scope
Office of Lifelong Learning’s Continuing Personal Education (CPE) strand has a statutory requirement to generate part of the combined Student HESA return for the University for 2011-12.
Business Objectives
Number | Objective Description |
1 | Ensure that the minimum data required for OLL HESA return in 2011-12 is captured in SITS/EUCLID to facilitate easy extraction with mimum manual effort |
2 | Ensure that the data required for the OLL HESA return in 2011/2012 is extracted with minimum manual effort and successfully passed to HESA by the required deadline. |
3 | Ensure the linked server and firewalls are updated to point OLLie Test to STAR_TEST and changes to SITS tables are reflected in the OLLie code (Brief) |
Deliverables
Number | Deliverables |
1 | Documentation detailing the minimum data required facilitating a valid OLL HESA return for 2011/2012, and also identification of data not currently held that needs to be captured for the return to HESA |
2 | Updated OLL processes to gather the data from students |
3 | Analysis and design documentation of changes required to OLLie fields/tables |
4 | Build work to develop the required changes to OLLie to facilitate the OLL HESA Return 11/12 |
5 | Where a programme of study spans 2 years ensure OLLie and HOLLIE can handle this work |
Deliverables and Project Sponsor Sign Off
All the goals of the project were met, however the project work included a lot more HOLLie issues than OLL issues (Our experience last year consisted of OLL issues).
The deliverables were fully accomplished.
The quickest reliable resolution was used when fixes or solutions were required, given that this is the last OLL HESA return in this format.
Cost Summary
Staff Resources Estimated on Project Brief (Days) |
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Actual Staff Resources Used (% Variance) |
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Other Resources Estimated on Project Brief (Money) | Not Applicable | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Actual Other Resources Used (%Variance) | Not Applicable | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Planned Delivery Date from Project Brief | Although expect to be complete by 31-Aug-12, project expects to remains open until 31-Oct-12 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Actual Delivery Date | 8-Oct-12 |
Project Manager's Commentary on Reasons For Variance From Plans The project kept within the + or - 5% of the budget. Below are some of the pertinent issues that arose during the project:
- The project was increased from 69 to 72 days to continue to cater for resolving OLL Issues before transfer and to handle a late duplicate student that came through the transfer that had to have 6 fields corrected on 5 HESA tables.
- At the start of this project the Archive process for 2010-11 was run in Production, and access was not available to OLL until it was resolved. Once resolved this year's project could start in earnest.
- An issue was raised regarding Art and Design students and how they could be handled. OLL set up dummy courses so they could be handled when the results came in during Term 4. However longer term, project STU229 to 'Replace OLLIE and CUPID (Options Appraisal)' will handle OLL Credit students.
- During August, SACS experienced a 320% increase in HESA batch runing time (from 4-5 hours to 16 hours). (No resolution has been found and will be an issue for SACS 12/13 Statutory Returns revisons Project). This had an impact on how often the return was re-run. There is no intention to re-run the 2011-12 return. What is not clear is whether or not this will still be an issue next year for HESA batches. Cannot tell if it is a volume issue or something else. SACS have run the 2012-13 HESA return and it ran in the usual 4 to 5 hours, however that was with half the data.
- Examples of the issues that required resolution were:
- Investigation of TYPEYR/FTEMETHOD requirement - at the time this took place it was as was notified at the January HESA seminar. This later was no longer required.
- Missing Start dates
- Missing End Date's and reason for End
- MODOUT had to be defauted to '6'
- Art and Design - OLL Credit in Term 4, business solution resolved by dummy course enrolements
- STGA (Scottish Tourist Guide Association) issues
- Unicode update required for OLL
- A number of individual students causing issues and requiring OLL, IS and / or SACS fixes
- Solving Archive for 2010-11 OLL tables and ensuring resolution for 2011-12
Key Learning Points
1. What went well?
1.1 HOLLie had previously not been supported by IS Apps as it was not on the Network, however when OLL was upgraded to Windows 7, HOLLie was moved to the shared OLL Drives and from then automatically backed up. 1.2 A number of data issues were resolved via scripts that updated the database - this resulted in the updates only having to be completed once (IS Apps Dev). 1.3 A number of data fixes were completed once the data files were transferred to HESA, this saved the amount of re-runs required, as they were talking 16 hours to complete (SACS Support). 1.4 Art and Design issue was resolved by setting up dummy courses (OLL).
2. What didn't go so well?
2.1 The archive process 2010-11 had 2 issues that required resolved before the project could progress. Please see https://www.jira.is.ed.ac.uk/jira/browse/STU223-1 and Unidesk call 120509-0208 for more details. Solution is explained in http://old.projects.ed.ac.uk/areas/student/general/STU223/PICCL.shtml - PICCL4. This issue was raised in early April, resolved and the OLL HESA Return User Guide (v2.1) updated. 2.1.1 The 2011-12 Archive should be run once this project is complete, so that the OLL data is ready for next year's new process. 2.2 HOLLie had a number of live issues this year before the project progressed. **MIKE Archive, + sonething else in Live ??**
3. If you had a project like this again, what would you improve? 3.1 In the application's current state it should be the last year it is run. If next year's OLL project is required using the currrent base code it will require a rewrite as it is currently little understood and cumbersome.
Info notes
At 3-Sep-12 Volume for OLL HESA 2011-12 - Out of the 300 Part Time OLL Students included in the 2011-12 return this equated to 68 FTE Students. Whereas for HESA the number was in the order of is 27,500 Students.
Outstanding Issues
None
Follow up Points
Archive for 2011-12 should be run, after both this project and STU211 Statutory Returns 2011-12 are both complete, through Apps Support.
For 2012-13 the work for OLL Credit Students (HESA) will be handled within SITS in Project STU229 to Replace OLLIE and CUPID (Options Appraisal).
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 1 days
Staff Usage Actual: 1 days
Staff Usage Variance: 0%
Other Resource Estimate: 1 days
Other Resource Actual: 1 days
Other Resource Variance: 0%
Explanation for variance:
Key Learning Points:
Outstanding issues: