XRN 5365
Request impact assessment on aligning Major Releases to the REC Release Schedule (Thursday release and 3 Major Releases per year)

Summary

The Retail Energy Code Manager have provided a view they are proposing to align delivery of Retail Energy Code to other market sector delivery implementation day of a Thursday. At present all CDSP change delivery is implemented over a weekend due to the impacts of making changes during peak system activity and processing days. These impacts were informed to DSC Change Management Committee when this was assessed previously, with the main impacts being file processing with little system downtime, and the risk associated with having to roll back the system and it’s related code, if implementation were not successful. At the time DSC customers approved to continue with a weekend implementation.
The Retail Energy Code Manager have provided a view they are proposing to utilise all 3 major releases in a year (Feb, June, Nov) for delivery of REC change, under current DSC funding arrangements customers fund 2 major releases per year, therefore need to understand impacts of increasing to 3 including costs to inform the investments made by our customers in each Business Planning exercise.

A detailed, deep dive assessment is being requested of Xoserve and it’s Service Provider, to identify the impacts of moving to a Thursday implementation for the delivery of DSC Change Proposals (DSC Change could include UNC modifications, REC change or other cross-regulatory impacting changes). The detailed, deep dive assessment needs to provide an understanding of:

- full impact assessment to systems/resource/processing/support, including specifically an assessment regarding cost impacts and justification for these.

- Options available: including if any specific types of release are particularly challenging, or could continue to be implemented over the weekend where these are not related to cross-regulatory changes;  

- notice period required to implement/extend delivery periods

- risks

- recommendation

- impact assessment needs to be based on solution architecture in place post CSSC implementation, to provide that prospective view of capability that will be in place.

The impact assessment will also need to include 3 Major Releases a year with the additional major release taking place last weekend (or a Thursday) in February each year, understanding of:

• Resource impacts
• Increased costs to customers
• Costs and risk of a 3^rd functional Major Release