Project Examples from 2011-12

Project Examples from 2011-12

Below are the project titles followed by the background information that was provided by the student. As you will see the sort of technologies used for a project could be any of the following:

· Database (relational – maybe standalone or web based)

· Multimedia package

· Programming/scripting solution (not VBA)

· Spreadsheet (advanced - ideally with VBA)

· Website /VLE/SharePoint portal for a specific purpose within your organisation

Service Desk Training Platform

“Within the NSOC, my area of work PQA has recently merged with the Service Desk. This team has had an acting manager for a long period of time and therefore all of the employees have developed their own methods of working practices. Since taking over the team, it has been established that one method of working needs to be put in place so that a training framework can be created for new employees.

To do this, an understanding of their day to day working practices must be established to identify areas of improvement. Once this information has been gathered, training packages can be formed to aid not only new employees, but current employee’s to adapt and improve their current knowledge and processes. The training will include knowledge forums, currently provided in my area of work, which I will adapt to suit the team, and also individual training specific to the employee. I will be able to see where they are from a management perspective in their working practices and see if there is a common occurrence which will benefit the whole team through further training. I will measure their knowledge level at the start of the project, through the use of surveys, and repeatedly send these out so that I can gather a general understanding of how they are improving.

Through doing this, the project will give more organisation to the team, as well as raising their morale as they will have the opportunity to identify their own areas of improvement, giving them input on how they are to develop. It will also aid the productivity of the team and also their efficiency in how they work, benefiting not only them but the company also.”

Proposal into a new Monitoring and Reporting tool for the NSOC

“The NHS Service Operations centre is currently under intense pressure from Connecting for Health (CfH) to improve the current monitoring systems that are in place for RiO. RiO is a community and mental healthcare application which is used by over 40,000 healthcare professionals spread across London and the South (Gold, 2011).

The application which is currently in use is called NMS, NMS is a simple dashboard which uses a traffic light system to show application health and how it is performing against BT’s Service Level Agreement with CfH. This application was designed by CfH however its major drawback is the fact that these results are not displayed in real time but are delayed by 15 minutes. This can have major implications when BT has only 30 minutes to resolve a severity 1 (Multiple trusts, no application access).

It has been identified that a new application which monitors and reports database incidents would be of significant benefit to BT and the NHS Trusts which BT currently support. By implementing an application which allows for users to actively monitor live database transactions BT can greatly increase its performance when identifying faults with the RiO application”

Application to Automate the Replication of Control M Schedules

“Currently within the BT Network there is a product used called Control M. The product is an automation tool and is used to save resource and money within BT.

Many applications run on the BT Network and each Application Support Group can request for Control M to run on their servers. There is a Control M team that look after the Control M product from its infrastructure through to the requests that are made from internal customers.

Part of the Control M team’s job is to build jobs and automation schedules that are requested by the Application Support teams. Currently within CORE Control M there are suites of jobs that are replicated 29 times. These replications are for CSS Districts, there are 29 districts around the country and each schedule typically runs jobs that pull information from the datacentres in a certain district.

Currently the team are using a script to build the suite of 29 schedules when a request arrives for them. The script allows them to build the jobs quickly but as soon as any modifications are required within the schedules then this has to be done manually and becomes very labour intensive.

This project aims to create a solution to this that will drastically speed up the building process and offer a user friendly front end user interface to create the schedules.”

NON MI Manager

“I am part of the Major Incident Team that is part of the NHS contract. The job description for each member in the team is to manage the highest reported incidents and restore service as soon as possible. However the team will get involved with mediocre severities such as severity 3’s or 4’s. When a dispute happens or where the impact is unclear the Major Incident Manager on shift will carry out an assessment based on impact by asking the right questions. Even if the severity doesn’t increase the MIM will watch over as there is always that possibility therefore adding value.

Currently there is no tool that records this involvement, therefore no credit or recognition is being realised and noted by senior management. Records are recorded within a tool called HP Openview but doesn’t highlight or emphasise the MIM team’s involvement. This has recently been brought to attention by the team’s operational manager and identified that a tool is needed to record the MIM team’s involvement.

The Visual Basic language will be used within Microsoft Excel to produce the tool. The reason for using Visual Basic is to give the user an application feel making it easier to navigate through information in comparison to cell scanning when trying to find or add information.”

Critical Application Search tool for Retail CSOC

“The Retail CSOC does not currently have a system in place where they can easily see what is affected when a part of a service has a fault. The CSOC currently have to rely on employee’s knowledge, or a use a wide range of tools to find the information. This takes time that the CSOC do not have when there is a service impacting issue, as this can impact resolution times. The problem came about when a number of issues were not resolved within the resolution deadlines. CSOC does not have a system in place where they can easily see what is affected when an application, product or one of their KPIs has a fault. Having such system would save time and also help diagnose the fault.

The solution is to produce a VBA application where the user can do a various amount of searches to see what is affected when part of the order system has a fault. With this application, the CSOC will be able to easily see what is affected when a certain part of the order has a fault. The 150+ applications, KPI and order/fault journeys will be researched and put into spread sheets for the VBA application to extract. This data will then allow the user to do various amount of searches with the VBA application, depending on what is affected. The VBA application will also be used to store e-mail templates for the team, so these issues can be easily communicated out. This will save the Retail CSOC time and will also help diagnose what customer journeys are affected and the applications involved when there is an incident. Solving this problem will help me when I am taking my Prince 2 and future qualifications, as it can be used as evidence.”

A project to develop a data capture tool to streamline and enhance escalations reporting, including capture and reporting of previously unquantifiable data

“The Openreach escalations teams solve issues caused by Openreach with the provision or repair of fixed lines in the UK telephone network. If an issue has been caused by Openreach error, customers are entitled to escalate for faster resolution. An email is sent to the escalations team, validated against strict criteria, then passed to a dedicated case handler to manage through to completion.

Each case handler fills in a spreadsheet daily, Appendix 3, and emails it to the reporting team who collate the information including totals of in-hand cases, closed cases and holding agent of escalations. The collated data is used to create reports, see Appendix 4. These drive improvements internally to reduce Openreach errors and improve RFT.

This method of collating data is time consuming and prone to mistakes as the process is highly manual. The data is not checked for errors or validated to ensure correct data formatting. Openreach customers have requested information that is currently not recorded, either in eViper or on the manual spreadsheets. The usage of the silver ticket process and the volume of disputed declined escalations are not currently recorded.

A solution to these problems is required to reduce time spent on recording and reporting, and to provide reports, internally and externally, that are accurate with the required data. Industry collaboration workshops have identified further reporting requirements, over and above the data which is currently captured.

The aim of this project is to create a tool for escalations agents to input information to a central database or spreadsheet, enabling automatic collation and reports to be run from this data. Agents will enter information on a daily basis and reporting carried out every morning.”

eApprentice: Centralising and Simplifying the Multiple Sources of Information and Assistance Available to Today’s Apprentices

“The project is focused around Openreach apprentices and helping them to develop and improve quickly and with ease. It is to create a central point providing apprentices with all the information or assistance that they might need, incorporating their job role, NVQ (National Vocational Qualification), BTEC’s (Business and Technology Education Council Qualifications) and Foundation Degree into the system. The information will be precise, include links to full documentation should they wish to look into the subject more deeply, as opposed to overloading them with information, and be kept up to date.

At the moment there are several points for information and/or assistance for apprentices which involves jumping between sources and scrolling through a lot of literature which makes finding an answer to a query very time consuming and, at times, frustrating. Information is often not updated either, specifically contact details for tutors and obsolete equipment.

The problem has derived from different areas of the organisation trying to provide a range of media with the means of looking up specific topics, often multiple pages of documentation which, as previously mentioned, results in the apprentice having to sift through a lot of information that they do not require and having several sources providing assistance on separate mediums.

I am trying to solve this problem as I have been in this situation before, not knowing where to look for help or wasting a lot of time searching. If there was a central point which was easy to navigate and precise in giving you answers then it would make the apprentice role easier and more productive.”

INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR COLLATING DATA ABOUT DISTRIBUTION POINTS

“In the Openreach network each customer’s telephone line from their house is connected to a DP. This DP is in the form of a telegraph pole or an underground joint with cables from each house connecting through it. When an engineer is given a job, within the information given is the telephone line’s routing. This routing amongst other things includes the DP number. Telegraph poles have metal plates on them with their relevant number. The DP’s that are underground are in un-marked boxes with a sealed joint inside them and the DP number is written on the joint in permanent marker.

The project manager sees that a problem exists because the location of the DP is not always easy to find. On occasions the location could be right outside the house and on other occasions the location of the box or pole could be up the road. There are a few applications that the field engineer can use to find the DP’s. One of these is a system called CSS. Another application called Network Records is on all field engineers’ laptops they can use it to see the location of DP’s and BT cabling in map format. This application is easy for an engineer who knows the area to use but as soon as the engineer is given a job in an area not known to them this causes problems.

The project manager is trying to resolve this problem because he works as a field engineer and he finds it hard to work out where locations of some DP’s are. He finds that the systems available are sometimes hard to access when in a remote location. Once one has access they still don’t provide the exact information that can be used to find the geographical whereabouts of the DP.”

Proposal for a Production database created using Microsoft Access

G***** currently utilises an access database for their main product the Dual Plate Wafer Check Valve, the system was created three years ago, it replaced an Microsoft Excel sheet that was updated manually, a member of staff was responsible for attending each work station and obtaining the list of orders that the work station had completed the previous day, the excel sheet was then updated to reflect the order status as of the previous day.