FCDO consular digital services delivery partner

Description

Summary of the work FCDO consular services is developing new and existing digital services to help British citizens abroad across a variety of channels and tools to ensure a better and more consistent user experience Expected Contract Length 24 months with option to extend for up to 6 months at the FCDO’s sole discretion. Latest start date Tuesday 30 November 2021 Budget Range Maximum budget of £4.5m Why the Work is Being Done FCDO delivers a number of Consular services to support British people travelling or living abroad. Some of these services have been digitally transformed. FCDO has an ambition to improve these, and develop new, digital services. We seek a delivery partner to support the development of services around how our users contact and interact with us across multiple digital channels to meet the Government Service Standard. We aim to start this work from November 2021. Problem to Be Solved FCDO needs a specialist delivery partner that can deliver outcomes based on user needs and government service standards across the product lifecycle. This contract will provide internal teams with core sets of skills capable of supporting a range of projects from inception through to live. Typical roles would include delivery manager, user researcher, full stack and front end developers, webops/deveops engineers, service designer and business analyst. This approach would provide continuity through the lifecycle of projects, ensuring no break in support and expertise built up in the team leading to improved opportunities for shadowing and knowledge transfer. Who Are the Users Users can be British people, travelling or living abroad, or local partners internationally (police, hospitals, local authorities). They will need to contact us and use the services to reach a variety of outcomes: As a British person who has lost their passport, I want a proof of my citizenship, so that I can get home. As a British citizen abroad, I want a Covid-19 test before I return to the UK, so that I do not have to self-isolate As a British person in a country that is in a crisis, I need immediate information on guidance for the country, so I can keep myself safe. Work Already Done We have already developed a series of discovery, alpha and beta phases working with existing suppliers, so this work would be to support existing services in development or live, for example, Legalisation, Emergency Travel Documents and assistance in-country. Existing Team FCDO digital services is a small team, working with internal business owners and subject matter experts. It has product management expertise across its services. Current Phase Beta Skills & Experience • Demonstrate a recent experience of delivering a high quality user-centred digital service that is compliant with or in alignment with the Government Service Manual. • Detail one recent experience of delivering a product or service successfully through Discovery to Public Beta phases including the agile tools, frameworks and techniques that were used and why. • Detail the ability to provide an extensive range of software development skills and disciplines across languages that you believe couple be used on Gov.uk. • Detail an agile, "test first" approach to software testing you have recently made. • Demonstrate and example of experience in using user research to inform user-centred design of a service through iterative improvement. • Detail recent experience of using performance analytics to improve a service. • Detail recent experience of working with multidisciplinary, mixed civil servant and managed service teams of specialists working to common service outcomes. • Ability to upskill client staff on core skills when required. • Detail recent experience of providing Agile coaching services to help build internal service capability. • Ability to provide core team roles, to supplement our existing capability, including delivery managers, user researchers, service designers, interaction designers and business analysts • Range and depth of expertise of technical roles in the Gov.uk DDaT job family, in particular frontend and software developer, with expertise and experience in developing for Gov.uk. • Ability to participate as panellists on internal Service Assessments, please include one example for tech leadership. • Example of working with AWS environments • Evidence of adopting open API standards and developing digital products that integrate into a larger architectural platform (1 example) • Evidence of contribution to architecture development i.e. application concepts, architectural CRs and advice on the technology stack (1 example) Nice to Haves • Experience of working successfully with UK Government and/or Arms Length Bodies (1 example) • Sector knowledge of what FCDO's business services and values may be • Evidence of having taken services to assessment and passed (1 example) Work Location King Charles Street in London Working Arrangments Team will be moving to be in the office two days a week in October. Security Clearance All staff working on FCDO premises must be at least SC cleared or capable of being cleared to SC. Bidders must confirm clearance of nominated resources. Additional T&Cs To promote fair practice we would encourage bidders not to use their organisation's name within their responses. ISO 9001, ISO 27001 certification (or equivalent) must be held by the supplier by the Service Commencement date. Evidence of certification shall be required. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria • How you would deliver a digital service solution • Demonstrate understanding/ability to deliver digital products/services to government Digital Service standards and Technology Code of Practice • How you plan to transfer knowledge to permanent staff within the client organisation • Team scalability, flexibility, deployment, time and pause capability • Illustrate core team skills/strengths, including CVs of key personnel including developers • How value for money will be achieved for the duration of the contract • Demonstrate understanding of the challenges of implementing user centred design in a government agile environment • Ability to meet Government Service Standard. In depth experience and evidence of how the standard has been met, please give one example. • Ability to participate as panellists on internal Service Assessments, please include one example for tech leadership. • Ability to participate as panellists on internal Service Assessments, please include one example for design or user research. Cultural Fit Criteria • Ability to work in suplier teams of with blended teams according to needs at the time. • Approach work with a focus on end to end services rather than products. • Focus on agile ways of working and user centred design. • Thorough understanding of continuous improvement using data and user research Payment Approach Capped time and materials Assessment Method • Case study • Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 20% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. Are there any existing suppliers involved with this scope? Are they able to bid for this work? There is no incumbent supplier in place. However, there is another digital partner in place and we expect the new supplier to collaborate with them. 2. Could the Authority please confirm if there has been a change of supplier since the discovery phase, or has the same supplier retained the work since Discovery to the current Beta Phase? FCDO is not able to share commercial information on individual stages of current ongoing projects. 3. What is the highest level of protective marking that will apply to the digital services data? Official sensitive 4. With which departments, i.e. PAG – does the Authority anticipate sharing information within the scope of these digital services? In scope services, where appropriate, will be subject to rigorous GDS service assessment (as well as others where appropriate). Also, services that are out of scope for GDS service assessment will undergo internal FCDO service assessment, closely aligned to GDS requirements. 5. Please confirm the primary interfaces and any adjacent projects or programmes with which the team will have to collaborate ? Various teams of Consular Directorate including Digital Services Team and 24/7 Resilient Consular Services Programme team; Information and Digital Department, GDS. 6. Is it possible for the Authority to share more information about the senior business user for the digital services and their objectives for the assignment. Consular Directorate is the senior business user. As stated in the procurement specification FCDO has an ambition to improve its digital services, and develop new ones. We seek a delivery partner to support the development of services around how our users contact and interact with us across multiple digital channels to meet the Government Service Standard. 7. Can the Authority please confirm if the output of this phase of digital services delivery will be subject to GDS scrutiny? We confirm the output will be subject to extensive and continued GDS scrutiny. 8. Is there an incumbent supplier? If so, who are they? Please refer to question 1 9. hi, is there a current incumbent providing these services? Please refer to question 1 10. Please could you confirm the following:-What clearances are required for staff not working on FCDO premises? • Where is the database/application currently residing?• What tech stack are you considering? Any team member, working on FCDO projects, accessing FCDO systems and data will have to be security cleared. The data is held in the UK. Tech stack: Programming Languages:.NET,Node JS,Java,ScalaAuthentication Providers:Cognito, Will also use IDD authentication e.g. AAD&MFADatabases:Document DB,Dynamo DB,RDS,ElastiCacheDevOps:CodeBuild,CodeCommit,CodePipeline,CloudFormation,EC2 Container Registry(ECR),No CI/CD Pipeline,Ansible,Puppet,Hiera,Jenkins CI,TerraformMessaging:SES,MQ,SQS,SNSAWS services:Control Tower,Backup,CloudFront,Detective,GuardDuty,Key Management Service(KMS),Kinesis Firehose,Route 53,Transfer Family,Virtual Private Cloud,WAF,Elasticsearch Service,AWSConnectMonitoring:CloudWatch,Config,CloudTrail,Security HubRuntime and Compute:API Gateway,Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2),Elastic Container Service(ECS),Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes(EKS),Elastic Load Balancing,LambdaStorage:EFS,S3Secrets Management:Secrets Manager,Systems Manager Parameter StoreThird Party Integrations:Bridge,Casebook,Gov.uk Notify,Gov.uk PaySaaS:Equinity Outreach(CABS),MSDynamics(CCEH),Iizuka Case Manager(Casebook),Worldreach PassportReach(Bridge/EPS)AWS DeployedCoTS:Mission Labs smart AgentFuture Considerations:MSK,Redshift,Quicksight 11. Please can you confirm what CR stands for in ‘architectural CRs’? CR stands for change request. 12. Do you anticipate all the engagements delivered through this contract will be outcomes based or might you in some instances require individuals to be embedded into teams led by FCDO or other suppliers? If the latter applies, please can you indicate what the split is between outcomes and supplying individuals? We anticipate a split of 50/50 between outcome based requirements and role based deliverables. 13. Are you content for suppliers to cite private sector examples where they are relevant to the question? For example, experience with AWS environments in a private sector setting should still be relevant. Private sector experience can be shown if relevant and aligned to GDS Service Standards and Technology Code of Practice. 14. Some of the Essential and Nice-to-have questions explicitly state “1 example”. Does this need to be one customer (with potentially several projects within an overall programme of works), or one specific project? Specific example are preferred, linked back to our requirements. Due to the word limits, suppliers will find it difficult to apply more than 1 well rounded example. For those that do not state “1”, more than one example is permissible. 15. Some of the Essential and Nice-to-have questions explicitly state “1 example”. Does that mean you are content for suppliers to cite multiple examples on all other questions? Pls. see answer to question 14. 16. Will you be using the scores from the Essential and Nice-to-have questions as part your assessment of Technical competence at the next stage? Or are they purely used for shortlisting purposes and then discarded? Successful suppliers that are shortlist will be invited to submit a proposal. This along with the Essential and nice – to – have criteria will make up the overall technical score. 17. Please could you confirm a forward timetable for the procurement? In particular, when do you intend to shortlist suppliers and how long will suppliers have to respond to the proposal request? And when will Presentations take place? We expect to notify shortlisted suppliers week commencing 11th October. There will be a somewhat swift turnaround for proposals. Looking to have presentations take place in early November. These are estimates and subject to change, timescales will be discussed further with shortlisted suppliers. 18. How will you be assessing price? (e.g. rate card) The pricing schedule is yet to be confirmed however SFIA Rate Cards will not be compared. It is likely that a fictional scenario will be used (featuring specific grades and roles) for price evaluation purposes. 19. Will you sponsor SC clearance for supplier staff where required to ensure a level playing field between List X companies who can arrange clearances themselves and the wider market who will require a government department sponsor? We confirm FCDO would sponsor security clearances if required. 20. For question “Detail recent experience of using performance analytics to improve a service”, please could you confirm what sort of experience you are seeking? For example, performance analytics to gather data from a beta/live service? Or to gather data from a development team to optimise the performance of service to you? The question refers to gathering performance analytics from beta/live services for, amongst other purposes, service optimisation for end users. 21. Question “Ability to provide core team roles, to supplement our existing capability, including delivery managers, user researchers, service designers, interaction designers and business analysts” is posed as a capability statement. Do you want suppliers to provide an example in the usual format to demonstrate capability, or are you seeking something more direct/specific? Usual format please. 22. For question “Detail recent experience of working with multidisciplinary, mixed civil servant and managed service teams of specialists working to common service outcomes”, please could you confirm what you mean by “managed service”? Do you simply mean the team members provided by the supplier to work alongside civil servants in blended teams? By managed service we refer to the outcome based nature of the service delivery. 23. For question “Detail one recent experience of delivering a product or service successfully through Discovery to Public Beta phases including the agile tools, frameworks and techniques that were used and why” please could you elaborate on the sorts of tools, frameworks and techniques that you believe are relevant to this particular engagement so we can select a relevant example project? We welcome examples detailing delivering products and services using the agile framework and expect suppliers to demonstrate their in-depth expertise in relevant agile tools and techniques. 24. The FCDO released a requirement for Consular Digital Services Delivery Partner on 3/9/20, which was awarded to Caution Your Blast Ltd (value £4.5m). Does the current opportunity represent an extension of this work with an additional £4.5m being made available? No, this is not the case. 25. Question “Detail the ability to provide an extensive range of software development skills and disciplines across languages that you believe couple be used on Gov.uk” is posed as a capability statement. Do you want suppliers to provide an example in the usual format to demonstrate capability, or are you seeking something more direct/specific? We are looking for a range of software development skills / capabilities to support CI, DevOps within a cloud environment. 26. Can you please provide more details on the technology stack that the supplier will be required to work in? Please refer to answer 10 for detailed input on tech stack. 27. Can you please confirm how the FCDO will be evaluating the price component of the bid? Please see question 18 28. “Detail recent experience of working with multidisciplinary, mixed civil servant and managed service teams of specialists working to common service outcomes.” – Please can you confirm what you mean by ‘service teams of specialists’ DDaT specialist teams, provided by suppliers, delivering outcome based work, whilst collaborating with Civil Servants. 29. 1. What is the procurement time table.2. What is the current front and backend technologies in use.3. What percentage of work would be for user researchers. 1. Please see question 172. Please refer to answer 10 for detailed input on tech stack. 3. It will depend on our requirements/services to be developed and enhanced. In general, FCDO is keen to conduct robust user research on every service we build/configure/enhance. 30. 1. How many and which resources are expected from Day 1. Are they to be SC cleared. Resources must be SC cleared to be able to start working with FCDO.Standard component roles of an agile delivery team are expected to be available from day 1. 31. With regards to the assessments referenced in the essential skills and criteria “Ability to participate as panellists on internal Service Assessments, please include one example for tech leadership.” – can you clarify whether these refer to internal assessments in preparation to formal GDS assessments for this project, or other projects, or both? Our requirement refers to supplier expertise to be available for internal assessments including for in scope projects as well as other projects across Consular Directorate, as required. 32. Please could you clarify whether this is a re-tender of this contract from last year (https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcomes-and-specialists/opportunities/13023) or whether this is a separate service. If separate, how do the two fit together? FCDO will require more than one delivery partner. As such, this is a separate requirement/procurement. However, all FCDO delivery partners are expected to collaborate and cooperate with each other and with in-house teams.