Organisation

Work/Task Breakdown

Planning

• Project initiation
• Preparation of brief
• Project planning
• Sign-off of brief

Deployment Requirements & Customisation Requests

• Project team to compile design requirements and associated files for Vendor
• Project team and Vendor to agree finalised version of requests based on feedback
• Vendor to commence development and design work on Beta site
• Project team and Vendor to review deployment schedule and revise Go Live date if required

Beta Implementation & Delivery

• Project team to review Beta Site
• Project team to run a trial group of users on Beta Site and gather feedback
•  Project team to confirm that Beta Site has been implemented as per configuration document
• Project team, if necessary, to add any further requests or modifications to the vendor
• Project team and Vendor to together agree on any Final Requests (where applicable)

Pre-Live Data Preparation

• Project team to send data to Vendor for verification
• Project team to determine if invitation e-mails to be sent by Vendor or Project team's own system
• Project team to draft invitation e-mail and send to Vendor for review and feedback
• Project team to provide invitation mailing list if different from content of data sent earlier

Final Implementation & Delivery

• Vendor Final Version implementation (estimated 2 week duration)
• Vendor to create access and permissions to management area for Final Version
• Project team to complete and sign off Project team Testing Procedure documentation against Final Version
• Project team to complete and sign off Project team Live Testing Procedure documentation
• Vendor to resolve any bugs identified 
• Project team to send out Mentor Interest Form

Go Live

• Go Live and hand-over to Project team ready for Launch

Post Live Promotion & Management

• Send Invitation Links
• Project team to perform marketing
• Project team to monitor for and review manual verifications that may arise

Closure

• Prepare completion report
• Submit for approval
• Close project

Resources, Skills and Costs

The original discussions around the deployment expected effort to be required around developing a data feed from Student Systems to the vendor, for upload to the alumni platform. However, it has transpired that D & A will be able to use an existing feed that they already receive and will extract a subset of that download to pass to the vendor, This, therefore, rules out the need for Development Services to be included and the anticipated resources have been removed from the original plans for this project. The main work of preparing the site and data will be undertaken by staff in the Careers Service and Development & Alumni. The preparatory work on Single Sign On was done under USG005, and the tasks that have needed to be doe since that project closed have been carried out by colleague in ITI.

The project estimate has been revised and is now at 34 days. The bulk of this work covers planning and project management, as well as management involvement, and consultancy with our support areas and Enterprise Management. The revised estimate has been discussed and reviewed with our business partners. Some additional time for benefits management has been included.

Governance

The wider project has a Project Board that meets every 8-10 weeks. This has been running since early 2017 and consists of senior colleagues from across Careers, Development & Alumni and Information Services. A record of its meetings and decisions are available from Simon Raeside.

The project is managed on a day to day basis by a project manager in Careers and another project manager in ADO, Project Services. They are in regular contact and meet in person approximately every two weeks. The former is the named contact for the project to communicate with the vendor. This helps control any messages with them. The project team also communicate regularly and meet as required.

Project Stakeholders

Project Estimations

Estimation at project planning stage - 34 days.