This pseudo-project was to track the work involved in our return from Forrest Hill and Wilkie Building to Appleton Tower. Initially this was expected to be pretty much just a case of reinstating the previously-existing network, though with some switch upgrades. However, the decision (made elsewhere) to defer the return for a year to allow for some of the interior to be remodelled meant the scope of the project had to expand.
Note that there was a separate project to track the Infrastructure Unit's members' move to offices in Appleton Tower. Note also that this project only accounts for the Infrastructure Unit's contribution to the return to Appleton Tower. Many other people also contributed, and this will be accounted for elsewhere.
The project proceeded in a number of phases:
9atN
switches
and setting those up to provide a temporary "Appleton Tower" environment
to which the rest of the switches could be connected, one at a time.
(The level-9 switches were used for this, as it was expected that ATL9 would
be the last floor to be occupied, and so these two switches could be left
until all of the rest had been set up ready to be installed.)
Design, procuring the switches, checking deliveries, and
setting up all the switches, including the profiles, configurations, and
the tracking page, took about another three weeks of effort.
(Aside: we left the Forrest Hill network in situ for IS to take over and run in their own way. At the time of writing we are actually still occupying at least some of Wilkie Building, and expect to do so until the new Bayes (DTI) building is occupied.)
Theon currently imposes a limit of three developers per project, and as a result it was not possible to capture Jennifer's involvement in the switch setup. This does show in the wiki page, however, and a reasonable estimate is included here.
Some other "infrastructure" work was done relating to the return to AT by other Units which arguably should have been part of this project. However, even had it been hoped to account for the work here, the above limitation, which was already causing a problem, would have made this impossible. That time will therefore have to be accounted for elsewhere. (Arguably there should have been an "umbrella" project covering this one as well as those. We should consider this when we occupy our parts of the Bayes building.)
Note that nowhere here is the considerable amount of technician-time required accounted for; and work done by other Units is assumed to be accounted for by them elsewhere. As noted above, we couldn't even add all of our own time to Theon, so it would certainly not have been possible to add other Units' time too.
Overall, the project took around 10 weeks of Infrastructure Unit effort, broken down as noted above. This is probably a touch higher than expected, based on experience for Forrest Hill. That's probably partly due to us not having a clean slate, and therefore having to work within and against the constraints of the existing cable plant, partly due to things being missed or in the wrong place as a result of prior usage, and partly due to additions such as level 9.