NCFE has been functionally complete for a number of months and has been waiting for MIS providers to be available to finish integration testing. During this time the project has been impacted by decisions from AQA and Pearson to not go live in September, and this has resulted in Capita FHE also pausing their go live.While the development team has been focused on A2C, other internal projects at NCFE have been affected with the potential risk of impacting our business plan goals.
In order to mitigate this risk to NCFE the senior management team has had to respond accordingly; the external factors of the A2C project have been reviewed, taking into consideration the reduction of AOs and the current availability of MIS providers to undertake an end-to-end test and pilot.
After discussion, the PSG has made the decision to reduce the development team and to focus on other high priority projects. The reduced resource will remain committed to the project and will be involved in any discussions such as with Capita SIMS and their VQ development. This will ensure that we retain subject knowledge and are aware of any potential changes.
This has been a difficult decision to make, however the senior management team believes that this is the most effective outcome to satisfy our internal projects and A2C commitments. Discussion around the benefit of going live on version 2 early in 2016 or to wait until version 3 is still being held, however this is subject to the availability and progress of the other organisations involved.
