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Appoint Project
Board | Agree Management
Structure | Agree Benefits
and Success Criteria | Establish
funding and Budgeting Procedures | Agree
Methodology | Formalise
Project Initiation
Appointment
of Project Board to agree purpose and aims
The first step is to gain the support of the authority at
the highest level and appoint a project board. A project board
should consist of a Strategist, a Project Leader plus at least
one collaborative partner, i.e. an associate at Borough or
District level.
The aims and purpose should then be established
formally and agreed.
The aims are shown under the Strategy
Section
The overall purpose was the provision
of a metadata standard, and an Information Repository, populated
with metadata conforming to this new West Sussex Metadata
Standard. In addition it was agreed to provide tools to expose
this metadata in an eGIF compliant fashion.
Agree management structure
Project Organisation Structure
(Click for larger version)
| Position |
Responsibilities |
| Project Leader |
The Project Leader is ultimately
responsible for the project, supported by the Senior User
and Senior Supplier. The Project Leader has to ensure
that the project gives value for money, ensuring a cost-conscious
approach to the project, balancing the demands of business,
User and Supplier. |
| Project Manager |
Is given the authority and
responsibility to manage the project on a day-to-day basis
to deliver the required products within the constraints
agreed with the Project Board. |
| Lead Developer |
Will ensure that the selected
solution is technically appropriate to meet the requirements
and to allow future enhancements to communicate with back
office systems. The person who will be tasked with the
work of identifying how the information repository will
interact with the existing network. A systems analyst
will need to be available for each partner |
| Information Management Officer |
Primarily tasked with; collating
the taxonomy; categorising and indexing the Service and
Process data. These individuals will liaise with developers
at each of the organisations. This person will co-ordinate
the communication with partners and other government agencies,
as part of the peer review and dissemination process.
Additionally, will work closely with the technical team
and communicate back to the Project Manager & Leader
on a regular basis the project progress. |
| Developers |
Will provide requirements
analysis, design, development and knowledge transfer.
Have experience of;
- XML development, schemas and namespaces
- Resource Description Framework
- awareness of Dublin Core standards
- proven Java 2 development skills (inc. Server side
and JSP/servlets)
- Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
- experience of working on an enterprise RDBMS system,
preferably Oracle
- good SQL skills
- understanding of UK eGovernment policy and in particular,
eGIF
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| Web Designer |
We used a web designer to
create our project website through www.sourceforge.net
tools. http://iman-repos.sourceforge.net/
This has given a professionally looking outlet to develop
the project further. |
| 2nd Tier Local
Authorities |
Reports to the IMO. Provides
taxonomy unique to their services. |
| Project Support |
Reports to the IMO. To assist
in the population and tagging of information for the repository |
Specialist IT Contractors were used to compliment
the skilled staff base already existing at WSCC. Additionally,
they proved to be useful mentors.
Reporting
- The Project Team met on a regular
basis (weekly and monthly) where progress and issues were
discussed and resolved, as appropriate
- All deployment decisions and infrastructure
(hardware and software) were documented and the software
deployment was also to be automated. This enabled others
to deploy the solution with minimum intervention
- Deviation from agreed requirements was subject
to change control processes at project board level. Note:
Foreseen deviation from projected release dates should be
escalated to the Board, who would then be able to drop items
from the deliverable scope in order to allow deliverables
to meet the milestones.
- Related project documents were filed using
available collaboration tools; Lotus Notes database (accessible
to West Sussex County Council partners only); CNET+ Project
Quickplace (accessible by project partners only) and the
project website (accessible to any interested parties)
- Any changes to requirements and scope were
handled via the project board and the change management
process.
- The project regularly delivered small, useful,
discrete sub-components that were all of production quality
standard. Feedback at each of these stages then allowed
changes to the ultimate design. Establish and agree deliverables
The agreed deliverables were:
- West Sussex Metadata Standard
- information repository
- a synonym data store
- a prototype searching tool
- harvesting and tool that enabled the extraction
- editing tool that enabled the construction
and amendment of metadata
- publish at least 50 documents.
Agree Benefits and
Success Criteria
Success Criteria
The development of the repository (1st milestone)
and its population with 50 information items (2nd milestone).
Other critical success criteria are:
- Publication of a common keyword list(s)
and framework for their use (deliverable: an agreed keyword
(metadata) list and framework document)
- Demonstration of use of Dublin Core, populated
by keyword (deliverable: Dublin Core template for HTML pages)
- The publication of at least 50 information
items appropriately tagged (deliverable: 50 pdf or similar
files published on website)
- A visualisation of the repository capable
of navigation (deliverable: HTML repository map)
- The use of a method to add "tagging"
information content (deliverable: software solution to add
tags)
- A method to add tagged information to the
repository (deliverable: documented management method)
To encourage ongoing support of the network,
it is vital that partners understand these success criteria
Benefits
- enable targeted searching and information
retrieval
- ensure that all requests for information
'point' to the same source
- infrastructure in place to maintain
and update the stored data
Establish funding and
budgeting procedures
The majority of the project funding came
via Central Government (oDPM) to support and develop the CNET+
Pathfinder initiatives. West Sussex County Council, in line
with their Information Manager programme, funded the remainder,
where the work will be developed further (see Next Steps)
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Costs
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Personnel - complete Project Team
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£165,000
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2nd Tier Authority input
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£3,000
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Software
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£13,000
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Hardware
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£2,000
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Total
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£183,000
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Agree methodology
Collaboration
- 2nd tier local authorities - 8 in total.
By integrating taxonomy from partners at Borough and District
level, the I-Man created their own more specialised vocabulary
according to the needs of the citizens within the locality
- Accessible Personalised Local Authority
Websites (APLAWS) - West Sussex County Council has adopted
their model as the basis for their category indexing
Scope
- Included items - information architecture
relying on technology to deploy
- Excluded items - content management
system, CRM tools, case-based reasoning tools
Assumptions and Constraints
- Any solutions must be eGIF compliant, with
specific focus on delivery mechanism (Web), and the eGMS
- All deliverable code and documents are likely
to be made available to CNET+ partners, and possibly subject
to peer review via GovTalk websites
- All source should be documented to an acceptable
standard, and automated tests exist for any code. Put simply,
any code without an automated test is deemed to be unacceptable.
This enables deployment to occur with confidence that the
code executes correctly
- Security solutions must comply with the Security
Frameworks developed by Central Government
- Simple Dublin Core tags must form the basis
of the West Sussex Metadata Standard
- Sun Microsystems Solaris and Oracle RDBMS
are assumed to be the preferred hardware/software solution
for WSCC IT projects
- Sun Microsystems Java™ 2 Enterprise
Edition (J2EE) platform solutions are assumed to fit best
with current development strategy, although it is accepted
that changes to the development strategy are likely within
the development period of this project, and must be accommodated
- The metadata standard tags defined must be
simple, flexible and to the maximum extent possible, stable.
It is important to avoid the expensive, (in terms of resources),
collation of metadata that is subsequently made obsolete
by the release of a revision the West Sussex Metadata Standard
(the schema)
- Citizen and Management interfaces must be
browser based, (see the eGIF documents), however this does
not preclude the use of plug-ins such as Java™ clients
- Any machine interfaces must be simple to
access, (by both local and remote computing resources),
and XML based. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) probably
fulfils this requirement best
- Specific hardware and software can
be acquired on demand in a timely manner
Timescales
The project began in March 2002 and was completed
at the end of June 2002
Desired Large Scale milestones
- Deliver a working Information Repository
- Deliver Management interface to repository
- Publish version 1.0 of West Sussex
Metadata Standard
- Deliver the thesaurus
- All input tools available
- Assess next iterations goals/deliverables
- Next large-scale iteration of project
begins July 2002.
Small scale milestones against current known
deliverables:
(NOTE: in these timescales the unit of time
for a deliverable naturally occurs every fortnight - in order
to release regularly, it is important that the resource planning
and sub-project designs/plans should take this elapsed time
period as the preferred iteration period.)
- West Sussex Metadata (draft)
- Management Interface to repository
- Data Capture tool prototype
- Prototype repository
- Data Capture tool prototype
- Initial population of Repository with 50
documents
- Navigation tool
- Peer review of emerging solution
- West Sussex metadata standard
- Construction of thesaurus/synonym data store
draft
- Query tools prototype
- Provision of web services to external sources
Formalise project initiation
All the above criteria should be formalised
in the Project Initiation Document (PID) and signed off by
the Project Board. Additionally, the Project Team should also
agree all items.
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