Chesterfield Borough Council

Whilst it may be beneficial to use certain enhanced features of the new system, they were not implemented as part of this project unless they were specifically identified as low risk / quick wins or approved as a change to scope.

The upgrade included the provisioning of new cloud-based servers and the conversion of the current Oracle database to SQL.

CBC, through its Project Sponsor, and Project Manager, had overall control of this project. G7 provided the necessary advice through project management, consultancy and the AMS. This experience and expertise ensured the CBC project team had the information they needed to make the appropriate configuration and project decisions, supplemented with technical services to assist in the technical conversion and upgrade and cloud hosting activities.

PDF of the table to be added in here.

• Project Management for planning and production of initial PID, risk register and plan.
• Current system review for upgrade and G7 Application Managed Service (AMS)
• Liaison with 3rd parties as necessary
• System extracts on current and upgraded milestones, extracting the set-up for comparison purposes between the non-upgraded and upgraded system
• Move across to new hosted platform with configuration checklists to ensure all technical requirements were in place
• Comparison of parameters between the 2 versions to highlight mandatory changes, saving testing time as it isn’t always apparent where changes have been made between versions
• Review and test interfaces, both for upgraded UBW version and cloud hosted platform.
• Review and assess with the Council any quick wins that can be included into the project, without greatly affecting scope
• Implement any new functionality – for Chesterfield, implementing incoming invoices as supplier and purchase workflow no longer available on the web on milestone 7
• Cutover plan
• Optional dry run to assess downtime during cutover and for testing Oracle to SQL conversion
• Acceptance Testing.
• • 3 levels of testing; unit testing whilst new areas are being built, Integrated Systems Testing ensuring processes run successfully end to end and User Acceptance Testing, where users are invited to test the upgraded system.
  • G7 assisted with the planning and the Council were able to contact the G7 AMS for any queries. This ensured a cost and time effective upgrade as the Council did not have to wait for the next consultancy day to have issues and queries answered, they could call the AMS, get the issue or query resolved and carry on with the upgrade.
  • Subject to the amount of changes coming out of the testing, another round is often planned to re-test
• End user training/documentation.

Chesterfield had also made the decision to convert their UBW database platform from Oracle to SQL.

A smooth transition from Oracle to SQL was ensured by G7 taking responsibility for all aspects of the conversion, from the copy out of the database tables from Chesterfield’s on-premise system, the secure transmission of the data to their cloud platform right the way through to restore, conversion and upgrade of the database.  This process was scripted, benchmarked and a number of dry runs were undertaken to confirm the robustness and timing of the conversion.

In parallel to this activity the UBW environments were built on the public cloud platform.

The go-live migration from Chesterfield’s on-premise Oracle system to the SQL Server Milestone 7 system was smooth and without incident. Chesterfield’s staff went home on Friday evening and when they came into work on Monday morning, they were immediately able to log into their hosted system and continue working exactly as expected.