And in the end, policy tweaks made most of it unnecessary
Sheffield University’s failed Student Lifecycle Project went through three leaders, several changes in scope and was ultimately superseded by government policy change before the bulk of the £30m project was abandoned in what is shaping up to be a classic IT disaster. As The Register reported, the original plans for the Russell Group university’s Student Lifecycle Project (SLP) – a £30.4m scheme to build a new system for managing student records – has been ditched. The project stumbled on integration with a Corporate Information System (CIS), which we revealed last week was running on Oracle 11.2.0.4.0. The software version went out of premium support on 31 January 2015 and extended support on 31 December 2020. Oracle provides « Sustaining Support » with limited updates and support options are available from third-party partners. When SLP was first planned, it was imagined it would replace the CIS. But as work began developers realised it was connected to so many other legacy systems – with little or no documentation – that this was not going to work. The plan then shifted to using CIS as « middleware » to integrate SLP into the University’s central identity management system, building access, timetabling and so on. « It’s plugged into so many different things, you can’t really separate it out and then to try to connect the new system to every single legacy system, » one insider told us, adding that it « proved uneconomical ». The plan to replace CIS was abandoned, and instead, the SLP was to use it to help the new system talk to all the legacy applications. But then the project team began to realise the data models between SLP and CIS were fundamentally incompatible. After a change in leadership, the SLP put more effort into understanding the fundamental challenges. That required consultants. « The more you look into something, the more complex it becomes. And then the project leader felt like we needed to get more staff to look into that complexity, so we just snowballed the number of business analysts and spending started to go up so dramatically. Then we got in a lot of contractors and we started to have a lot of churn of those contractors, so they acquired a lot of knowledge and then they would leave, » the insider added.
