Training.gov.au Project Blog

Project Update

Members of the project team have been presenting to a variety of stakeholders including State and Territory Governments, Industry Skills Councils and Registered Training Organisations.

These meetings provide stakeholders with an update on the progress of the project, what to expect over the coming months and how to prepare, as well as providing a forum to have their questions answered.

As the recent addition to the project team as the Stakeholder Engagement Manager, I will endeavour to keep all of our stakeholders informed as much as possible over the coming months.

System Integration

System Integration (Web Service) specifications have been distributed to stakeholders, including RCABs, STAs and RTOs for comment. We are working with these bodies to finalise these specifications, ensuring that they:

• Comply with nationally agreed data standards;
• Are compatible with data provider/consumer systems;
• Minimise the development effort data providers/consumers will be required to invest to support the new interface; and
• Align with data provider/consumer business processes.

Following finalisation of these Web Service specifications, we will work with affected stakeholders to determine if there are any obstacles to them making the necessary changes to their systems within the required timeframes.

Data Migration

After a few delays, a data migration company have now been engaged to migrate all the regulatory information and national training data from both NTIS and Training.com.au to the new system in time for the launch in May next year. The supplier will be working closely with ISCs to determine which versions of Training Packages are migrated.

There are over 330,000 pages of training package data alone that needs to be migrated and the project team will be working closely with the supplier to ensure the work is aligned with the transition plan endorsed by the NPMC and NQC.

Contextual Content

The text and images on the three websites that’s not data is referred to as “Contextual Content” in that it’s content that gives context to the data on qualifications and Units of Competency and explains vocational education and training in Australia.

A final round of photography was shot in Sydney on the 17th of November which brings the total of number of career paths photographed to 50. The final shoots included Qantas Engineers, Virgin Blue flight attendants, a Graphic Design Studio, an Events Management Company, Toni & Guy Hairdressing, Sydney Buses and NSW Maritime.

The content team will now concentrate on writing up the real life stories of the people photographed and adding an inspirational element to be featured on yourtraining.gov.au and trainyourpeople.gov.au.

Stakeholder Consultation

Stakeholder consultation has been a main focus for the project team this past month with trips to WA, SA, NSW, QLD, VIC and TAS completed, the ACT currently taking place and NT in the pipeline.

Tags: build, consultation, consumer, design, development, distribution, documentation, engagement, mailinglist, NTIS, plan, regulatory, RTO, schedule, specification, staff, stakeholders, team, The project, transition, travel, usability, webservice, webservices

Posted in Project Management, The project | No Comments »

Additions to the project team in November

We would like to welcome Jo-Anna Wood to the project team, who’ll be our Stakeholder Engagement Officer - the main contact and liaison point for the project with our stakeholders. She’s been travelling around with Marty the past few weeks meeting our State and Territory Government colleagues, Registered Training Organisations and other stakeholders and users meeting everyone we’ve been working with over the past 18 months.

We’d also like to welcome Quinton Smith and Stephen Harris to the project team, both experienced C#/ASP.NET developers who’ll be complementing the KAZ development team and David Shaw our other DEEWR developer. Quinton and Stephen are starting today.

Tags: contractors, development, jo-anna, new, people, personnel, quinton, staff, stephen, team

Posted in Project Management, The project | No Comments »

User Acceptance Testing: Interim Training Package Tool

We’re progressing through the build of the Phase 2 Interim Training Package Tool, a lite version of the Training Package Data Management Tool that is being developed for use with the data migration project to QA migrated Training Package data.

In mid-January (possibly earlier) we’re going to be looking for the assistance of Training Package developers to conduct what is called User Acceptance Testing (UAT) on the Interim Training Package Tool.

By the time the Tool gets to UAT it will have already undergone functionality, system, heuristic accessibility and usability testing - so in theory it should all be working fine and bug-free, however the developers and even the DEEWR project team are not Subject Matter Experts (SME) so we need your help to verify that the Tool is fit for purpose and will actually work in a real work situation.

We’ll have about 4 days to conduct UAT and it will most likely need to be facilitated by a DEEWR project team member on-site so we’ll be doing this testing with a sample subset of the Tool user group. We will try and fit this in with existing and ongoing stakeholder engagement and consultation activities which Jo is now faciliating as the new Stakeholder Engagement Officer on the DEEWR project team.

Tags: beta, datamanagement, datamigration, interim, sme, testing, tool, uat, utility

Posted in Training Package developers and STAs | No Comments »

Draft Web Services Specification

We received the final Draft Web Services Specification document from our software development services vendor yesterday; I’m now preparing that document to go to our Regulatory, Training Package and Consumer Technical Working Groups to be disseminated later today via the mailing lists that have been set up.

This draft document does not include an XSD schema - that will come later after the final specification has been developed based on feedback from this external consultation period.

Thank you to all the third party software developers and training professionals who have nominated to participate in the Consumer Web Services Technical Working Group - your input is appreciated!

Tags: document, prc, rest, schema, SOAP, spec, specification, webservices, XML

Posted in Regulatory WebServices Interface, Software developers, TP WebServices Interface | No Comments »

Consultation

Many of you will have received an email from me regarding proposed stakeholder engagement times for us to come and showcase our work to date on Training.gov.au. I can tell you right now we have had an overwhelming response from RTOs interested in learning more about our new system, which has been fantastic and we have been very busy in coordinating meetings with RTOs in NSW and QLD so far. If we don’t get around to seeing you this time, don’t worry, we’re planning on keeping this line of communication all the way to launch date, and so you probably will hear from us again in following months.

To those of you who we’ve already met; thank you so much for your feedback and we have already started to discuss the issues that we raised and where possible, we’re looking to implement them in the upcoming release of training.gov.au.

Hope to see you soon!

Tags: consultation, design, stakeholders, The project

Posted in The project | No Comments »

Web Services specification consultation

The expression of interest registration for the draft Consumer Web Services specification consultation has been closed. The three mailing lists have now been populated with technical staff representing STA registering bodies being subscribed to the Regulatory Web Services consultation list and the twenty three people who registered for the third party software developers list have been subscribed to the Consumer Web Services consultation list.

All subscription notices have been sent out and the draft web services specifications will be issued through these mailing lists on Wednesday 29 October next week.

Tags: consumer, mailinglist, mailmanlist.net, regulatory, trainingpackage, webservices

Posted in Registering and accrediting bodies, Regulatory WebServices Interface, Software developers, TP WebServices Interface | 2 Comments »

Progress report 21 October

I’ve been working on-site with the co-located development build team for a week now although I’ve been back and forth between the two offices quite a bit over the past three weeks. Things are moving at a rapid pace - we have three streams of work occuring simultaneously with detailed design and architecture documentation and modeling across the database, data management tools, public websites and web services.

The project team including developers, architects and project managers with our vendor as well as our own people and contractors now consists of 21 people.

We’re also entering an intense stage of stakeholder consultation and engagement which includes utilisation of mailing lists and on-site visits around Australia; Marty, Leanne and Alison have been travelling this week kicking off this round of engagement with RTOs. I’ll probably be travelling to Adelaide next week to help out with that stakeholder consultation as well as firing up the web services mailing lists. I have a draft version of the web services spec on my desk for review - it’s currently around a hundred pages.

We’ve changed the model slightly so the specification includes all three web services interfaces so I’ll just have to figure out a way to pull out the relevant sections of that document to circulate to Industry Skills Councils, Registering Bodies and third parties (software developers) as part of the external consultation.

Also reviewing the Master Test Plan which details how testing for each of the system components will be conducted and working with Leanne our project coordinator to fit the system testing in with usability and accessibility testing as well as user acceptance testing (UAT).

What is user acceptance testing? Basically the purpose of UAT is for the client or user to determine for themselves that a certain component is fit for purpose. The functionality should at that stage all be working and defect-free so nothing should break, but it’s about making up your mind and having confidence that it is actually good to go. Now, considering that the project team are not the end users of many of the components of Training.gov.au we’re going to be inviting some of our stakeholders to be involved in that user acceptance testing.

Not sure exactly what the format of that testing will be - whether we’ll send you a link to a testing environment for you to “play” with a certain piece of Training.gov.au or whether we’ll come out and visit you and ask you to go through several business scenarios so you can familiarise yourselves with the entirety of a component to the point where you can say that you are confident it’s ready to start using.

Given the quick turnaround times on UAT in the project schedule we won’t be able to get to everyone who’ll be using each of the interfaces and sites and in some cases we might only invite a single person to be part of that process - however we also will need real end users to help with usability testing too. If you specifically want to be involved in either of these testing phases please get in early and let us know now so we can plan accordingly and try and incorporate such requests into our travel schedule.

Tags: build, development, engagement, RTO, staff, stakeholders, team, testing, travel, uat, usability, useracceptance, webservice

Posted in RTOs and training professionals, Software developers, The project | No Comments »

NTIS to Training.gov.au transition diagram

Alison has prepared a diagram showing the timeline and dependencies of the Transition of NTIS to Training.gov.au (PDF 18 KB).

Tags: NTIS, plan, schedule, transition

Posted in Project Management, The project | No Comments »

Mailing Lists

We’ve now entered the final technical design phase and commenced preliminary development of Training.gov.au, which means frameworks, generic user interface widgets and setting up our software deployment processes including user acceptance environments etc.

As part of this technical design phase we are working on the draft web services specifications for the Regulatory Web Services interface and the Consumer Web Services interface (soon to be followed by the Training Package Web Services interface).

We want your help in developing these specifications and have now set up some mailing lists that you can subscribe to that we’ll use to distribute draft specifications and faciliate conversation around those specifications. We’ll also be using the mailing lists to coordinate the deployment of the interfaces once developed and faciliate the cut-over.

The Consumer Web Services Mailing List will be initially populated with a list of everyone who has expressed their interest. The Regulatory Web Services Mailing List will be populated with everyone we know in each State and Territories’ registering bodies through an invite - so you’ll have the option of passing on the invite or opting not to participate (if your role has changed).

We’re just setting up the mailing lists now and everyone who’s signed up for Consumer Web Services consultation and all the technical staff we know of in each of the registering bodies and State and Territory Governments will be hearing from us soon.

Tags: consultation, consumer, distribution, documentation, mailinglist, regulatory, specification, webservices

Posted in Registering and accrediting bodies, Regulatory WebServices Interface, Software developers, TP WebServices Interface | 2 Comments »

Training.gov.au Project Schedule

In keeping with our commitment to keep our stakeholders informed about the progress of the new Training.gov.au system, we’ve put our project schedule up on the blog for you to see exactly where the project team is at. This timetable has indicative dates for all project milestones and deliverables between now and the proposed launch of Training.gov.au in May next year. This schedule is based on our project plan and therefore will be updated to reflect any future changes accordingly. Feel free to leave us feedback if you have any questions.

http://blog.training.gov.au/project-timetable/

Tags: Project plan, schedule, training.gov.au

Posted in Project Management, The project | No Comments »