Closure Report

Project Summary

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 71 days

Staff Usage Actual: 87 days

Staff Usage Variance: 23%

Other Resource Estimate: £0

Other Resource Actual: £0

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Outcome

Project successfully deployed

• the latest version of the Learn upgrade,
• the building blocks were updated by and
• timetabling were able to deploy the updated Timetabling Group Import building block

Benefits

• Excellence in Teaching and Learning: This upgrade will enable Learn users to benefit from enhancements in version 9.1 Q4 2016, in the following areas:
  • Improvements in performance and security
  • Improved experience for mobile users and updates to look and feel
  • Improvements to time saving including key workflows
  • Assessment enhancements in core teaching and learning tools
  • Improvements in reporting
• Quality services/infrastructure: by delivering a central upgrade service we will be able to reduce costs and improve reliability.
• Enhancing our student experience: this project aims to deliver innovative use of technology in pursuit of quality teaching and learning. Being able to present this via a single VLE where the student can navigate around and digest what could be a disparate set of tools is critical to making this feel like a quality and coherent experience.
• A more secure application: by introducing scanning for vulnerabilities

Success Criteria

• Successfully upgraded and integrated Learn platform to v 9.1 Q4 2016 with cumulative updates (if any) applied
• Successfully updated building blocks
• Application successfully scanned for vulnerabilities

Explanation for variance

Bonus as the upgrade progressed smoothly through DEV and TEST. As a result the project required less than estimated effort at that point and was able to include 2 Unidesk calls in this project

• I161026-0474 - JIRA TEL043-22 - ECA BB- Downloading not working with hidden columns
• I170515-0907 - JIRA TEL043-4 - Course Menu Text Issue

However when the project went live in July it required a significant amount of time in order to resolve a number of factors:

• There were outstanding issues with some Building Blocks which were working on TEST and did not work on LIVE.
  • these issues took until the 20-July to be successfully resolved and then signed off 28-July
• This resulted in the project overspend. In June the Project Actual Total was 65 days, however in July it was 87 days
  • July was expecting to require 6 days.
  • The actual time spent exceeded the project budget

Business felt Dev Tech team was very stretched as the same resources are experts on a number of systems.

Key Learning Points

The Learn upgrade was able to go ahead successfully on the same day even though the LINUX upgrade had to be run and tested first before the  LEARN upgrade could start.  (LINUX completed at 9:30 and testing shortly after that the LEARN upgrade began.)

Project completed the Learn Upgrade and improved user experience by the delivery of the upgraded building blocks

Project Benefit : Rubic work was able to be completed within the project

The building blocks were not essential at this point, but are future proofing Learn

Lessons Learnt:

Useful to have the same project manager for project duration - As well as have the PM on the implementation day

There was an issue related to a  folder in the content storage  which is checked when servers are restarting to ensure the content storage is available after patching. It looks like after the upgrade of Learn  this folder was not there so the start-up script failed. Apps have corrected this and tested on Dev and Test and then deploy to the Live servers but it will only be able to be tested on Live next month. Further information can be found in PICCL 8

Project communication at times needed to be verified.

• Recheck / validate key communications via the project meetings and notify any one that missed it.

Outstanding Issues

No known issues