Closure Review

Project Summary:

Background

The Scientia Enterprise applications are the University's chosen application suite for providing a shared academic Timetabling service. The Scientia applications also provide an ad-hoc Room booking service for Staff and Students via Web Room Booking.

The Scientia applications work on a separate database for each academic year. Each year, there are therefore tasks to create the new database and instances of each application for the next academic year. The roll-forward tasks take place in stages at appropriate times in the calendar and the applications are then re-pointed at the switch-over. For the 2017/18 academic year, this switch was scheduled for Mon 7th Aug 2017.

This is compliance work that is too large to be delivered within the current support budget and is therefore run as a project each year.

Scope

The scope of this project was restricted to the tasks required to roll forward the core Scientia Enterprise SDB and Web applications, the associated interfaces / feeds to other systems and the re-pointing of BI suite reporting. This included any decommissioning tasks. The roll forward tasks were documented on the Wiki prior to the start of this project.

The following were excluded from the scope of this project

• Project work associated with the new feed from Timetabling to the new Lecture Capture system
• Decommissioning of 15/16 database as this is required for historic reporting
• MyEd Portal - Student calendar app replaced by CalSync feed to O365
• Remedial or enhancement work to resolve existing issues unrelated to the roll-forward project
• Investigation or resolution of existing infrastructure issues

Objectives

The key objective for the project was to deliver the roll forward to allow activities (lectures, tutorials, labs, other misc classes) and rooms to be scheduled and allocation carried out for the new academic year.

Deliverables

The following deliverables were identified for completion of the roll forward

Benefits

This was a compliance project which has allowed 2017-18 Timetabling planning to occur as required and enabled the Timetabling service to continue into the new 2017-18 academic year.

Success Criteria

The following criteria were identified to confirm whether the project was successful in meeting its objective:

• UOE1718 SDB available in Scientia Enterprise by end of Nov 2016 - Achieved
• 17/18 Web Applications available during Dec 2016 - Achieved (Jan)
• In March 2017, incoming interfaces will start to populate 17-18  with data from IDM and EUGEX - Achieved (Apr)
• Course Timetable Browser, Bookable rooms, Calsync process, Learn outgoing interface and the BI Suite will be switched to point at 17-18 RDB at dates to be agreed with the business - Achieved
• From 7th August 2017, all Web Applications will, by default, display/refer to  2017-18 as the current academic year when accessed by any user in the University - Achieved

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 150 days

Staff Usage Actual: 175 days

Staff Usage Variance: 17%

Other Resource Estimate: 0 days

Other Resource Actual: 0 days

Other Resource Variance: 0%

Explanation for variance:

Key Learning Points:

Successes:

This year's roll forward project went well with all roll forward tasks completed as required and with no outstanding issues at the start of term. The milestones were on the whole met or only slightly delayed. This is reflected in the number of days used for this roll forward. This is reduced from the previous year's project TTU012 – Roll-forward to 16/17 where the actual days used was 212.

A number of reasons for this success were identified including

• the automation set up the previous year
• the project team experience. This year, the project has included sharing of knowledge within both IS Apps and the Timetabling Unit to have additional resources with timetabling roll forward expertise
• the work around the incoming interfaces progressing well

Managing the roll forward (TTU014) and upgrade (TTU013) projects together with same core project team worked well. It is recommended that this approach is adopted again in future years where there are upgrades.

Project meetings are recommended to cover both roll forward and upgrade projects due to the overlap and dependencies. This year a 1/2 hour meeting was held once a week and supplemented at key stages by stand-ups. This approach worked well.

Switchover is now seen as straightforward and it is recommended that Production take ownership in the future. 

Major Issues:

Puppet use - There were manual changes made during the year which were not in Puppet. This added time and effort while it was worked out how to ensure the roll forward could use the Puppet automation put in place without impacting the live service.

Bamboo Issues - Earlier in the year, issues with Bamboo meant that the plans could not be used and some roll forward tasks had to be completed manually during this period. This meant more effort to plan, document and complete the manual tasks.

CalSync - This year was the first year a roll forward of CalSync was carried out. During the roll forward work, a difference between TEST and LIVE was noticed and it was identified that the opt out functionality was not working in LIVE. A plan was put in place to resolve this issue as part of the project and the roll forward was then completed successfully. This meant more effort completing the tasks.

Recommendations for Similar Projects:

As well as the successes above where the approach is recommended to be adopted, there are a number of other recommendations which should be considered by TTU016 for the 18/19 Roll Forward.

There is one issue where we were occasionally unable to build an image. This has been difficult to reproduce and conflicting advice was given by Scientia. Nothing further can be done without being able to consistently replicate. This should be flagged as a risk in TTU016.

A couple of EUCLID changes had been made during the year which required last minute code changes on the Timetabling side of the interface. The need to flag any changes which could potentially impact the interface will be re-iterated by the Project Sponsor. It is recommended that TTU016 includes an earlier task in the plan to check for any changes.

The dependencies between the IS Apps tasks and TTU testing weren't always clear. The IS Apps roll forward tasks are defined and stored on the Wiki and there are separate Timetabling Unit test plans stored on a shared drive. These have been updated during this year's roll forward but consideration should be given each year to any further improvements which can be made the links clearer.

BI Roll forward can't be automated. There is a tidy up piece of work to reduce the number of connections and simplify this area. Version control around the BI reports can also be discussed with Service Management. This is documented on the Wiki for TTU016.

Outstanding issues:

It has been agreed that the following tasks will be completed under TTU016.

• TTU014-61 1516 IIS Web Sites have not been decommissioned from LIVE - this will be completed following the Special CAB period.

• A number of entries for old timetabling services / systems in the load balancer have been identified. These should be checked to ensure they are no longer used and then cleared out. This will be picked up by TTU016.