ICT Service Management
The eProcurement Scotland (ePS) Programme has a dedicated ICT Service Management Team, who continually ensure the effective delivery and development of the ePS service to participating customer organisations. Specifically they look after change management, performance management, capacity management, integration support, business security & continuity and major & minor release management.
Change Management
Change management processes include:
- electronically logging and recording requests from customers to change existing functionality/cosmetics or add new functionality to the systems/ applications provided as part of the ePS service
- managing and monitoring logged requests received from customers to ensure work specification is accurate and delivered on time and within budget
- recording programme issues and risks along with managing relevant mitigating actions
- managing problems by acting as an escalation point for customers who have issues with problem resolutions logged with the ePS service provider.
Performance Management
Service Provider: performance of the ePS service provider is managed and monitored by the team. Regular meetings are held to review the overall progress of the programme as well as providing an opportunity to review individual issues and the performance.
Service Levels: regularly monitoring service levels to ensure adherence to the agreed targets for the service provider in responding to, and resolving, incidents reported by customer organisations.
ePS Service: performance of the overall ePS Service, such as systems and applications, is continually monitored to assess and analyse response times and availability.
Capacity Management
Capacity Planning is carried out regularly in conjunction with customers to forecast potential usage increases which may impact on the overall performance and to permit any necessary remedial action.
Integration
Customers often have a requirement to integrate PECOS with their back-office systems, in particular with finance system. The Service Management Team are available to provide advice and guidance on integration issues.
Business Security & Continuity
Ensuring the continued availability and security of the ePS service is a prime objective of the Team. Business continuity plans are in place and these are prepared and tested annually as recommended by Audit Scotland. They use a matrix to ensure that:
- data storage is secure and suitably backed up
- disaster recovery plans are in place for the service providers
- data can be successfully recovered
- recovery on the service behaves in an identical manner to production
- data integrity is maintained.
Annual tests are carried out for implementing the constant recovery service (CRS) to ensure it continues to meet the requirements for business continuity for the eProcurement Scotland service.
Major & Minor Release Management
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of new releases, whether major or minor, must be carried out to the highest standard. Full end-to-end testing of all new major releases is carried out by the service provider and ICT Service Management. They provide a consistent approach to ensure that the new release is 'fit for purpose'. Full test coverage results, and documentation of the end-to-end testing, to a standard that would satisfy audit is provided. Minor release testing is carried out at the ePS Programme and customer level assisted by the service providers. In addition they prioritise content, quality assure both new releases and patches, manage and schedule deployment, roll-out to customer environments, and manage programme and customer communications.
Customer Only Area
Customers who have registered to use the customer only area of this website can access documentation such as PECOS user documentation, release notes and help desk service agreements as well as forms which can be used to submit issues, raise Requests For Change (RFC) and raise Change Control Notes (CCN) or work requests.
Customer Only Area: Use this link to access the Customer only area.