Closure Report
Project Summary
Changes to Consumer Protection legislation and the Teaching Excellence Framework in Higher Education have resulted in changes made to the Undergraduate (UG) and Postgraduate (PG) degree finders in order to remain compliant.
As per the STU251 project, Communications and Marketing (CAM) reviewed the UG and PG application and created a number of JIRAs which formed the requirements to the project. These JIRAs took on the form of;
- an analysis of the compliance issue
- what we need to do
- how will it be tested
- what will success look like
Deliverables D1 to D5 were developed and delivered successfully on time and on budget. Deployment was carried out on 11/10/2017. There were some fixes required after deployment and these were completed and re-deployed on 01/11/2017.
Deliverable D6 was the only JIRA at the start of the project that was considered a "should have", and would be reviewed at the end of the development phase to ascertain if we could do this in the time remaining. Once JIRAs D1 to D5 were complete and deployed D6 was reviewed and deemed to require considerably more effort than originally estimated. This was then brought into scope of the project as it was considered a compliance issue as potentially wrong information could be displayed to students.
Development was completed in March 2018, and handed over for UAT. UAT commenced after Easter annual leave but discovered some issues which were raised as JIRAs and resolved before deployment on 09/05/2018.
Objectives and Deliverables
|
Objective 1 |
To deliver the deliver compliance enhancements to the CAM UG & PG Degree Finder applications.
|
|
Achieved |
| Objective 2 | Document each compliance update in JIRA, stating the requirements, the testing required to be completed and the success criteria | Achieved | |
|
D1 |
Change display logic for Fees information on programme template (PG) |
Must have |
Achieved |
| D2 | Update all instances of "Key Information Set" text in UG admin and UG degree finder | Must have | Achieved |
|
D3 |
Ability to overwrite cascading subject content with programme content
|
Must have |
Achieved |
|
D4 |
Must have |
Achieved |
|
|
D5 |
Ability to publish multiple instances of the undergraduate degree finder |
Must have |
Achieved |
| D6 | Ability to publish multiple instances of Postgraduate degree finder | Should Have. Scope change to Must have. | Achieved |
| D7 | Updated TAD | Must have | Not required |
| Objective 3 | Applications Management perform the peer testing of each completed JIRA, ensuring the success criteria is met, then pass onto CAM for UAT. | ||
|
D8 |
A more robust application is delivered for user acceptance testing to CAM, and Applications Management gain familiarisation of the changes prior to being put live. |
Must Have |
Achieved |
All objectives and deliverables have been achieved.
Scope
The original scope of the project was to deliver the compliance JIRA updates (deliverables D1 to D5 above) which were scoped and written by CAM.
There was a scope change 0n 31/08/2017 to bring D6 (JIRA 25) into scope and increase the project budget by 11 days bringing the project up to 85 days from 74 days.
There was a follow up estimation on change of developer and this increased the budget by 34 days to brining it to a total of 119 days.
Analysis of Resource Usage:
Staff Usage Estimate: 74 days
Staff Usage Actual: 108 days
Staff Usage Variance: 45.9%
Explanation for variance
The reason for the increase in budget on the project was to include JIRA 25 "Ability to publish multiple instances of the postgraduate degree finder" into the scope of the project. The initial estimate increased the budget by 11 days on 31/08/2017, a re-estimate on 21/12/2018 further increased the budget by 34 days.The initial estimate was for a simpler option that did not require the extensive changes that were subsequently required. The simpler option was not adequate for CAM's needs.
The original 3 point estimate did not include D6 (JIRA 25), but this was estimated after all the other JIRAs were delivered to see if this could be completed within the time permitting, or at what additional cost.
Key Learning Points
One of the issues we has was that D6 (JIRA 25) took some time to estimate correctly.
The development resource working on this had problems in locating and installing the very old version of the Yii framework environment in order to accurately estimate and start the work. There was a further issue with setting up the development environment. This led to delays in getting started and getting an accurate estimate together for the work required, which needed to be done as they were unfamiliar with the application. The previous "worst case" estimate was now believed to be the "best case" in the 3-point estimate. Due to the delays with the environment set up, the developer availability was reduced to the point where it was no longer possible to complete the work in the allocated time. It was decided to handover to the another developer and wait until 01/02/2018 when they would be able to start and complete the work. The estimate was revised to add an extra 34 days giving a total project budget of 119 days. 25 days of which were development time.
Learning Point:
Refer to the MoSCoW document below for estimating and prioritising deliverables
https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/insite/Project+Scope+and+MoSCoW
Complete the estimation at the beginning of the project for all the must have / should have deliverables that are in scope. Ensure that a scope change is recorded for any "Could Haves" that are brought into scope and a change is estimate is recorded.
There are more limited resources available for old frameworks, hence the preference to move the application to new technologies.
Outstanding Issues
There are no outstanding issues.