Closure Report

Project Summary

Background

There is a legal requirement for the University to be able to effectively manage and monitor the University’s responses to information requests made under information legislation (the Data Protection Act 1998 until May 2018, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from May 2018, (Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2005).

Due to an increase in requests the University was not managing to respond to a number of requests on time. Given that FOI requests have statutory deadlines that must be met it was critical that this project identified a solution that  introduced efficiencies in managing requests. Additionally, the introduction of GDPR has meant that there are shortened deadlines for most subject access requests (1 month), more complexity in the way we are required to respond and potential requirements to provide responses in specific “portable” formats.

The request handling process had evolved around the initial ColdFusion application developed in late 2004.  The process used a number of additional tools including spreadsheets, shared drives, Outlook, BI reporting and paper files.  This was inefficient, leading to duplication of effort and unnecessary manual calculations resulting in a significant administrative burden on the staff.  As a result the University had been subject to a level 1 intervention because of our response rates.  The University had formally committed to the replacement of the tool as part of our response to that intervention.

In order to move to a new tool to manage information requests the task was split into 2 projects.  Phase 1 was the options appraisal project STU263 Options Appraisal for Replacement of Information Request Planning Monitor Tool which was initiated to investigate a number of options both internal and external to provide Records Management with a suitable replacement tool.  The outcome of the options appraisal paper was a recommendation that the most suitable approach was to progress with the procurement of an external solution via the Government Digital Marketplace.

The purpose of this project, Phase 2, was to carry out an evaluation of FOI request management solutions identified from the G-Cloud marketplace during the options appraisal project.  This led to the procurement and implementation of the preferred solution as software as a service (SaaS). 

Scope

The following was in scope for this project:

• Evaluation of FOI management solutions identified from the G-Cloud marketplace during options appraisal.
• Procurement and implementation of preferred FOI management solution via the G-Cloud.
• Analysis of existing request management tool database leading to the migration of historic requests to the new management tool.
• Once the replacement system is signed off, the decommissioning of the historic ColdFusion application and environment.

These all remained in scope

Out of Scope

• The management and control of users and their access to the system will a manual process controlled by Records Management.

Records Management control the process of managing system users, this remained out of scope

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 170 days

Staff Usage Actual: 175 days

21/22 - 17.8 days

20/21 - 79.3 days (157.2)

19/20 - 77.9 days

Outcome

Deliverables

Explanation for variance

• Challenges during Procurement
  • There were a number of challenges experienced during procurement which took time to resolve - Issue 2
  • Discussions over liability - Issue 6
• Covid 19
  • All Project staff were working from home during the pandemic. There were delays across the project as staff adjusted to the challenges presented by the change in working circumstance
• Scottish Legislation Changes for eCase
  • There were changes required to eCase to enable it to meet Scottish Legislation requirements. These changes were delivered in November 2020 however The Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner (OSIC) Reports were delivered after a slight delay in January 2021
• Email Integration - Issue 12 
  • The preferred option from Service Management was  to use an email relay as this was already in place for similar cloud based solutions. The supplier was unable to work with this solution despite it being in their documentation. This lead to the email integration having to be reworked and this took time to get authorisation and agreements in place. 
• Data Migration - Issue 18
  • The migration of historic data from the existing FOI system had been identified as an area that may take longer than expected. The initial extracts were produced by the Project Team and given to the supplier, however there were delays in bringing the data into the Test environment.
  • The Project Team undertook a significant period of UAT on the migrated data to ensure if was usable for them through the eCase system, and during this identified a discrepancy between the number of cases expected in the system against what was supplied. This required additional time from the supplier to resolve.
  • An issue arose when data was migrated into the LIVE environment - the Project Team identified cases previously entered into LIVE were missing from the system following the data migration. Only after escalation did the supplier investigate and resolve the issue. The supplier produced an incident report covering the issue, cause and resolution of the incident and the steps taken to prevent reoccurance
  • Following the issues with the Data Migration, the Records Management team required a data assurance period to give them suitable confidence that they hadn't missed any data ahead of signing off the decommission of the old FOI system

Benefits

The anticipated Benefits from the implementation are below. Records Management will monitor these as the continue to use eCase

Success Criteria

Key Learning Points

Outstanding Issues

• N/A