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101

My understanding of the problem is that a large majority of all Bader related work is being done by volunteers, but lead by HQ perms. The priorities have obviously been swapping over to JPA, but isn’t that done now? The real issue there is why the hell did HQAC not have a plan in place for when the Universe contract expired. Instead an amazing team of volunteers working on admin reduction had to start work on something that should really be being done by a well paid team of perms, or sub-contracted.

I may be wrong, but that’s what I see. Great volunteers doing great work, with some interesting decisions/priorities from perms.

102

In fairness as I hit reply I was thinking this, not just IT but hiring anywhere is hard at the moment.

Presumably it isn’t actually those doing the programming that are at fault, more the senior leadership working out the priorities.

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103

Without doubt.

104

Ive heard someone mention Sept. Maybe clesr comms of timelines now JPA is off the agenda may be visible.

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Priorities at the last Bader Officer update were

  • Transition to JPA (Complete)
  • Migration from Joint Server Farm (JSF) to Oracle Server Infrastructure (OSI)
  • Deployment of Learn

Learn can’t be deployed until the OSI migration is complete as needs to go onto the new infrastructure.

I’m still hearing this quarter as the target.

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106

It’s apparently been delayed yet again to at least the end of the year as they’ve had to change service provider. Basically they have to start from scratch again. That’s what I was told anyway from my source.

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Good afternoon all,

I’ve been away for a few days so just catching up and thought I would give a bit of an update with where we are on the Learn journey and address some of the comments made, I will only comment on areas that are relevant to my AOR.

To provide some context the Digital team at HQ is split in to 3 areas, Infrastructure, Development and Information Management (iHub) with the VSDT having sat under the Development area of the team.

There have been a number of concurrent projects, with various elements of each project being supported by different areas.

Learn as a platform has primarily been developed by the VSDT LMS Manager, with integration support from both Civil Servant Developers and the VSDT Lead Developer, the development environment infrastructure for Learn has been built by the VSDT LMS Manager and the Civil Servant Systems Manager. The Learn platform and development environment was ready at the end of 2021 for review and approval by the MOD penetration testing and accreditation team, however this was postponed by them due to higher priority tasking. At the point this work was then carried out and approval to proceed granted, the mandated move from the Joint Server Farm (JSF) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) had begun, the OCI work is being conducted by the Civil Servant Systems Manager. The impact of this resulted in us not being able to stand up the production version of Join in the JSF and the OCI environment not yet being ready.

As it currently stands, the OCI environment is now 85% complete, the environment is subject to penetration testing and accreditation which is booked and currently scheduled to take place during June, this includes the infrastructure for Learn.

Once the assessment and accreditation is complete, we have a wing on standby to conduct further user trials in the new environment, after which we will launch the to the whole organisation.

Meanwhile, different members of the team continue to engage with Ultimedia over the hugely inconsistent results of completing courses as well as the inability to resit certain exams after a first attempt.

We are well aware that this is having an impact to the organisation and given the choice, would not have had 3 significantly large projects come together at the same time with such a small resource to deliver them. These projects are all in addition to the routine tasks that have to be conducted by civil servants, whether that be mandatory training, device management, security reviews, equipment purchasing, WiFi in maintained buildings etc.

There are comments in this thread aimed at civil servant colleagues which are wholly unacceptable, and whilst I am absolutely keen to remain a member of this community to provide input, I must caveat that I will not engage where mutual respect cannot be shown.

The civil servants that my team are privileged to work with work tirelessly for very little reward, continuously challenge the status quo to ensure digital ways of working are adopted and routinely work extended days both during evenings and weekends so as to work with volunteers.

I hope that the above provides some insight as to where we are and how we are moving forward.

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