Collaborative Online tools for Business and Community Engagement Case Study Case Study Title
Knowledge House
Institution(s) involved
Knowledge House, Universities for the North East, Durham University, Northumbria University, Newcastle University, Teesside University, University of Sunderland, MJ Associates
Contact + Email
Paul Cranner – paul.cranner@knowledgehouse.ac.uk
JISC programme (if applicable)
BCE
Project Dates
March 2009 – June 2010
Tags
Collaboration, project management, CRM, Higher Education, HE, Open Source, commercialisation, business development, Knowledge House, Universities for the North East
Headings/Questions
Explanation and further information
0. Briefly describe your project
Universities for the North East (Unis4NE) is the regional association of the universities in North East England (Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside). Knowledge House (KH) is a collaborative service offered by Unis4NE to help companies access the world class skills, expertise and specialist resources available within these five universities. KH operates via a hub and spoke model with a small central headquarters and staff distributed at all five partner universities. To support the work undertaken across the network, a web-based collaborative CRM and project management system is utilised – the Knowledge House Information System (KHIS). KHIS handles the full project life cycle and supports the sharing of project and contact information across multiple teams, allowing them to collaborate and be aware of other activities that may be related to their work. The system was designed in-house to meet the very specific requirements of universities and interactions between them. The purpose of the KH trial was to tailor the brand new version of the system – KHIS 2.0 – to the requirements of an external partner. The aim was to validate the potential of releasing a vanilla version of KHIS as a generic project management tool. In addition, KH undertook to identify the criterion that makes software a likely Open Source (OS) candidate and alternatives to OS such as Software as a Service (SaaS), with a view to determining the OS potential of KHIS.
1. Why did you use this approach?
KHIS was established in the late 1990s to allow a small group of users to manage multiple projects. As the profile and remit of KH grew, so did KHIS. By 2007 there were over 700 active users and tens of thousands of projects, companies and contacts were stored in the system, along with a vast repository of documents, emails and reports. However, the system reached a plateau as it was not designed to handle so much data or cater for so many users. KHIS 2.0 was conceived specifically to address problems with the original system:
The application was difficult to maintain as no recognised design pattern was followed 1
Collaborative Online tools for Business and Community Engagement Case Study
System logic and presentation of data were tightly coupled
Data security and integrity were engrained in the code
The user interface (UI) was inconsistent
Transactions were unaudited and users could delete data which did not belong to them
With the above problems in mind, four key requirements were identified during the design of KHIS 2.0: 1. Security – must be fundamental to the design in order to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act 2. Extensibility – the system must be flexible and open to extension by an external developer 3. Customisability – functionality and layout must be easy to customise 4. Robustness – must use industry standard, modular design patterns In meeting these requirements, it was anticipated that KHIS would be flexible enough to allow it to be configured for use outside of the original remit of the universities. The purpose of the trial was to validate this vision. 2. What is the context in which you are using this approach?
Trial User Groups Two user groups were involved in the trial:
KHIS Champions – Core System Users KHIS is primarily used by the Business Development Team within each of the five regional universities to manage commercial activities. Each team has one or two nominated KHIS Champions who liaise between users within their own institute and the KHIS Development Team. The KHIS Champions are typically long term users who have a deep understanding of the concepts of KHIS and how to use the system.
MJ Associates (MJA) – Trial Partner MJA is an SME based in North East England, offering specialist project consultancy services. MJA was tasked with using KHIS to manage projects and interactions with clients, with a view to evaluating the usefulness and potential weaknesses of the system.
Projected Timeline A phased roll out of KHIS 2.0 was planned to start in the summer of 2009, initially to the Business Development Teams and with the full involvement of the KHIS Champions. Pending acceptance of the new system, the plan was to tailor a separate version to the requirements of MJA. In parallel to the trial, KHIS 2.0 was to be rolled out in phases to other university teams, departments and faculties. Anticipated Implementation Issues As KHIS 2.0 was designed and built in-house from scratch, it was anticipated that the system would need to be tested extensively before it could be launched. The team behind the design of KHIS 2.0 had also moved on before the project started. Although appropriately skilled replacements had been recruited, a learning curve was anticipated for the new team to fully familiarise themselves with the system architecture and framework. Although the core functionality of KHIS 2.0 was the same as the original system, due to changes to layout and workflows, it was anticipated that user training would have to be delivered and training material developed. 2
Collaborative Online tools for Business and Community Engagement Case Study 3. What collaborative online tools and other technologies were involved?
Core Technology KHIS is written in Adobe ColdFusion with a Microsoft SQL Server backend. The use of these proprietary technologies is historical and in line with the skill set of the development team. Support Site 1
The OS Trac platform was used during the trial (and beyond) to support users. Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system which allows users to lodge tickets reporting KHIS bugs, data anomalies and additional functionality requests. Hosting The entire system is hosted on dedicated servers at the University of Sunderland. KHIS 2.0 was designed to handle multiple accounts and the security model allows data belonging to a specific account to be hidden from all other accounts. It is also possible to customise an account’s UI without affecting others. However, given the nature of the trial with MJA, a completely isolated version of the system was established to insulate the core university system from potential problems. 4. How did you design or set up the interactions design?
KHIS 2.0 was designed and developed in-house to meet the four main requirements of security, extensibility, customisability and robustness. The KHIS Champions were frequently consulted during the development cycle to ensure the proposed solution was acceptable and appropriate. Database Design To best enable rapid extensibility and customisability, the decision was taken to move away from the traditional relational database model of the original system and instead utilise a hybrid Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) model. Although this model is accepted as being less efficient, it offers the significant advantage of being extremely flexible, allowing the rapid implementation of new data fields without the need to modify code. By way of comparison, consider the following example: A Northumbria user needs to record an internal reference code against all new projects. In the original system this request would take a full day to implement; the database would have to be modified, and all underlying code and reports individually adjusted and tested. In KHIS 2.0, the same request would only take 10 minutes to implement; the new field could be inserted into the database as a project attribute, added to display templates, then everything would simply work. The EAV model also allows finer grained security and auditing which addresses the security concerns of the original system. Application Framework The KHIS 2.0 application framework is based upon the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, the major advantage being the separation of data access, functionality and presentation. As well as addressing the problem of tight interconnections between logic and presentation, the framework is robust and allows rapid customisation with minimal coding effort.
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trac.edgewall.org 3
Collaborative Online tools for Business and Community Engagement Case Study 5. How did you implement and embed this approach?
Staffing The implementation phase was initially complicated by the loss of the Project Manager and Senior KHIS Developer on maternity leave. Aside from a reduced development resource, the impact on the trial was minimal due to stringent pre-project planning. KH identified “substitutes” for key project personnel and budgeted for their participation in the project in supporting roles. Following a one month handover, the supporting developer was seconded into the role of Senior KHIS Developer for the whole of 2010. System Testing During development of KHIS 2.0 a test site was established and feedback invited from the five universities. Some were more active than others due to the perceived importance of KHIS 2.0 within each institute. Several saw the new system as a key business development tool and actively reported feedback, whilst others simply planned to use baseline functionality due to institutional commitments to other CRM systems. Familiarity with KHIS 1.0 As long term users of the original system, numerous key users were reluctant to switch over to KHIS 2.0. Several approaches were taken to combat this:
A user guide was produced by non-technical KH staff
Monthly KHIS Champions meetings were held to demonstrate the new system, identify problems and address concerns; the KHIS Champions were than able to disseminate the information to users from their own university
On-site sessions were arranged with teams (to address overall concerns and expectations) and individuals (to observe how people actually used the system)
Training sessions were arranged with the KHIS Champions who were then able to deliver similar sessions to users within their own university
Technical Issues As anticipated, development effort was slowed slightly whilst the development team familiarised themselves with the overall system architecture. As a means to help future developers, extensive use was made of the supporting wiki to document technical aspects of the application. Following testing, KHIS 2.0 launched in November 2009. Although a slight reduction in performance was anticipated due to the new database architecture, performance was notably very slow. It transpired this was down to the volume of data imported from the original system. During testing only recent data was imported; when the system was launched all data was imported, dating back as far as 1995 and comprising hundreds of thousands of records. To combat this, all inactive data was archived and archive filters incorporated into the application. To allow errors to be proactively tackled, functionality was incorporated into the application to automatically email the developers details of system errors. The monthly KHIS Champions meetings were used to convey subsequent bug fixes to users. KHIS Evaluation Having successfully launched and stabilised KHIS 2.0, the trial with MJA ran in accordance with the stated objectives. As a supporting activity, KH conducted an evaluation exercise to elicit opinions on the current system and future requirements from key university users. The aim was to amalgamate the results and devise a roadmap of future actions to take KHIS forward. In tandem with this exercise, a study exploring the OS potential of KHIS was conducted.
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Collaborative Online tools for Business and Community Engagement Case Study 6. What benefits is this delivery approach producing for stakeholders?
KHIS Champions The KHIS Champions forum proved to be invaluable during the entire development lifecycle of KHIS 2.0 as it allowed the development team to promote the new system, address concerns and gain buy-in from the key users. The forum was especially important when resistance to the new system emerged and the post-launch performance issue surfaced. By acting as intermediaries, the Champions were then able to convey important information to users. Increased University Buy-in The key KHIS stakeholders are the five North East universities. The extensive development work undertaken during the project resulted in a stable, flexible and robust system which is now being actively used by the universities to manage business development activities. KHIS 2.0 eradicated the recognised problems with the original system. For instance:
Data cannot be deleted – instead it must be archived with a full audit trail
Permission screens show users who has access to projects, contacts and companies, increasing confidence in system security
Restrict mail flags indicate whether companies/contacts have opted in to receiving marketing material
Explicit permissions ensure only power users can export data from the system
As part of the rollout and following a recommendation from the KHIS Champions, each university account was skinned in corporate colours as it was felt this would encourage people to use the system. Subsequent feedback verified this viewpoint. Due to the increased confidence in KHIS 2.0 it is envisaged that it will be rolled out to other teams and departments within partner universities in the final quarter of 2010. MJ Associates MJA successfully used a tailored version of KHIS to manage aspects of the business. Perhaps of most value, though, was the identification of missing functionality that would be required to make KHIS a generic project management system. It was envisaged that this functionality would have been fully implemented within the lifetime of the project; unfortunately, due to the aforementioned issues this was not possible. Support System Over the duration of the project, the support system emerged as an extremely valuable tool. Not only did it allow users to formally report bugs and track progress, it also allowed the developers to document the system architecture for future reference. The automatic error logging functionality in KHIS 2.0 allowed many errors to be rapidly corrected, a measure that was commended by the user community. Training Material Given the revised layouts and workflows, the training manual proved to be an essential point of reference to users during the launch of the system.
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Collaborative Online tools for Business and Community Engagement Case Study 7. Did implementation of this approach have any disadvantages or drawbacks?
Technical Overhead A primary requirement of KHIS 2.0 was that it was extremely flexible. Although the EAV database model undoubtedly ensured this, several downsides to the architecture emerged:
An initial higher workload was placed on the development team as more coding effort was required to implement the framework
All data is saved in the database as text; before performing operations on dates and numbers they must first be converted into the appropriate format which places overhead on the application
Due to the complex architecture and weak typing constraints, intricate queries are often required to retrieve data
System Testing Due to the day-to-day work commitments of both users and the development team, the testing phase of the project was not as long or thorough as it should have been. Had more detailed “white box” testing been applied instead of ad-hoc tests, many of the post-launch bugs would have been eradicated prior to the launch. Training Material Given the constant evolution of the new system, it proved to be difficult to maintain the written training manual. Following a recommendation from the KHIS Champions, the manual will be transferred to the support wiki post-project. Not only will this ensure that users always have access to the most up-to-date training material, they will also be able to contribute content themselves, thereby promoting collaboration. 8. How will this approach be taken further?
KHIS Roadmap A KHIS Roadmap was produced to formalise the results of the trial with MJA and the user evaluation exercise. The roadmap documents the additional development work required to further the uptake of KHIS. Some are generic requirements that are applicable to all variants of the system; some to the university version only; and some to potential commercial/OS adaptations. All requirements were prioritised and the level of effort assessed. Implementation of the high priority requirements is currently ongoing with development work expected to be completed later in 2010. KHIS Rollout Following implementation of the high priority generic and university-specific requirements, Durham and Sunderland are very keen to rollout KHIS to other units, departments and faculties with a view to adopting the system as an institute-wide solution. As part of another JISC-funded project analysing customer/project relationship management processes, KHIS is being evaluated by several regional initiatives including the Institute for Local Governance (ILG). ILG is a pioneering research and knowledge exchange venture designed to maximise the benefits of collaboration between the region's universities and wider public realm. ILG is keen to adopt the system to manage collaborative activities and is exploring this avenue with Unis4NE. Open Source and Commercial Variants The OS feasibility study verified the potential to release a vanilla version of KHIS, uncovering both positives and potential pitfalls. The greatest positive being the architecture of the system is such that it can be rapidly customised and extended by external developers; the greatest pitfalls being cost and the necessary initial time investment from key KH personnel. 6
Collaborative Online tools for Business and Community Engagement Case Study Pending implementation of the high priority requirements identified in the KHIS Roadmap, it is envisaged that the system could then be adapted into a vanilla version (by removing the university-specific customisations). This vanilla version would then form the platform from which OS and commercial versions of the system could be developed. Each variant is proposed as a standalone future project and Unis4NE is keen to further explore and exploit such opportunities. 9. Summary and Reflection
In conclusion, the project confirmed the potential to adapt KHIS for use outside of the HE sector. The trial with MJA identified additional functionality required to make KHIS a generic project management system suitable for use outside the HE sector. Ideally, this functionality would have been implemented within the lifetime of the project but unfortunately this was not possible due to the delayed system launch and implementation issues. However, the requirements were fully documented, evaluated and prioritised in the KHIS Roadmap. The user evaluation exercise identified further system requirements and these too are documented in the roadmap. As it stands, KHIS has been successfully upgraded and is now being actively used by the North East universities to manage collaborative activities. It is envisaged that the system will be rolled out to further user groups within the universities over the coming months. The system is now stable, robust and, pending implementation of the high priority requirements will be in a configuration that will allow the system to be adopted for use by non-HE organisations. Recommendations for Readers Undertaking Similar Projects
Identify substitute staff with similar skill sets for key project personnel to counter staff leaving
When implementing a new collaborative system, identify all stakeholders in advance and gauge opinions before implementation commences
Utilise face-to-face meetings with key stakeholders as much as possible through the entire project lifecycle to ensure buy-in
Thoroughly document the system architecture and the rationale behind major design decisions for the reference of other developers
Data protection is an essential consideration in collaborative systems; measures such as auditing and explicit user permissions must be employed to control access to data
Do not underestimate the testing phase and ensure detailed white box tests are applied as well as ad-hoc black box tests
When trialling a new system, test against the entire dataset rather than a subset to verify the robustness of the system
Consider the use of a wiki/ticket system to encourage collaboration between developers and users
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