Continuous Improvement and Support for OPG’s Digital Case Management System

Tender description

Summary of the work Making regular code deployments to iteratively imperative the Live system Bug fixing and problem solving Working in an Agile team Working collaboratively with OPGs Dev Ops team who provide platform service support, and other integrating applications Working with the Product Owners to deliver stories from the backlog in priority order Expected Contract Length 2 years Latest start date Preferred start date no later than 30 June 2017 Budget Range Upper limit of £750,000 (with VAT) per year. (Budget increased from previous yearly spend to accommodate additional developer resource with estimated velocity of delivery required) Why the Work is Being Done OPG’s case management system is business critical; it supports over 1000 users and processes approximately 2.5 thousand Lasting Powers of Attorney applications per day. Maintenance is required to ensure the continued running of all business functions the system supports. Requirements are; to minimise the risk of loss to business productivity through any application related problems, and to continuously improve the existing application to increase business productivity. Support will be ongoing, with priority business requirements achieved first. Problem to Be Solved We require a dedicated team of developers to monitor and support the Live case management system, and to maintain the testing and training environments. The team will need to work creatively to find solutions to problems and deliver stories from the backlog, making continuous improvements to aid OPG caseworkers to register Lasting and Enduring Powers of Attorney. Work on the application needs to be conducted collaboratively with OPG’s Dev Ops team who provide platform service support, and other integrating applications such as our document and data capture system. The team will work in an Agile way, alongside the Product Owner. Who Are the Users The primary users of the the bespoke digital case management system are OPG employees who review and register applications for Lasting Powers of Attorney and Enduring Powers of Attorney. The teams using the system are varied and diverse. They need to be able to process applications without any errors quickly, and deal with any applications that require further work. They need to manage large volumes of work, whilst working accurately. Early Market Engagement N/A Work Already Done The MVP has been delivered on Sirius Lasting Power of Attorney functionality, but there are many areas that still require advancement and that will be subject to signifcant change. Basic MVP basic design has also been achieved for Enduring Powers of Attorney, the Power of Attorney legacy document, but more work is required to achieve full realisation of business benefit. The system needs to be able to dynamcially respond to deliver additional functionality for changing business requirements and will need to be continuously iterated. Existing Team Existing Support team includes 3 developers one front end specialist (Angular JS) and two back end specialists (PHP) but with considerations of anticipated velocity and projected work to be completed and with addional budget we would expect to increase resource. Current Phase Live Skills & Experience • Strong Object Orientated PHP (Zend2) Experience: Server-side web apps; Doctrine/Doctrine migrations; Relational and nonrelational DB systems (PostgreSQL) • Range of approaches to testing (functional and non-functional); Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and/or Mac OS X; Git version control system • Continuous integration (preferably with Jenkins); ability to develop efficient, highly optimised code; Automated unit tests and API tests using Beha • HTML/Javascript/CSS; AngularJS (1.4 and 2.0) and Protractor, Javascript; understand prototypical inheritance and be able to create testable, modular code; CSS3 with LESS • WAI accessibility [Level A, AA, AAA] Grunt, Gulp or equivalent; Git version control system Nice to Haves • Have demonstrable experience of successfully delivering high transaction digital services to national organisations working in complex and highly regulatory environments • Based on current team, expectation is 4 full time developers and 1 x QA resource 1 day p/w. Requirement for full stack compliment, heavier on back end development skills • Experience working within an agile environment • Experience using Jira and Confluence. Work Location Some remote working is expected, but team would be required to spend 2-3 days on-site in Birmingham where office space is provided. Working Arrangments Self-organising Agile team available between core hours 09:00 am and 5:30 pm with some out of hours time for release and hotfixing. Security Clearance Security Clearance (Must have 5 years residencey in the UK) and DBS Additional T&Cs Any expenses shall be submitted in line with the Ministry of Justice standard Travel and Subsistence policy. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria • Evidence of the required level of technical capabilities • Proposed team structure (including CVs of key members) - Reference contract/ case studies examples including linked CV’s • Value for money • Evidence of experience of working on a scratch built, open source and open standards CMS • Evidence of ability to work with other suppliers and civil servants, as part of a wider Programme Team • Evidence of being able to work in an Agile team Cultural Fit Criteria • Must be transparent and collaborative when making decisions • Must share knowledge and experience with other team members • Must take responsibility for their own work • Ideally, can provide constructive challenge to suggest initiative and the status quo • Ideally, can translate technical concepts to business users and business concepts to technical staff • Ideally, be an enthusiast for the benefits of Agile • Ideally, would be familiar and comfortable with public sectorways of working Payment Approach Fixed price Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 65% Cultural fit 5% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers 1. We would like to request a call with the OPG product owner or representative to understand the context, nature of backlog, expected duration of engagement and any requirement for other digital specialists. Could this be arranged ahead of submission deadline? Many Thanks A question and answer session will not hold in respect of the requirement. Clarification questions on the requirement should be raised in written format and sent appropriately. To demonstrate fairness, openness and transparency our responses to clarification questions will be published on the DOS portal to ensure that all suppliers have access to the same information about the requirement. 2. What is the tooling make-up and configuration of the OPG Continuous Integration and Deployment pipeline that supports the Digital Case Management System? "We use open source components to provision required test and production infrastructure in a public cloud platform.The configuration is managed in private source control repositories and is applied automatically as part of a continuous delivery effort." 3. What are the other applications that integrated into the Digital Case Management System? Other integrating applications include our Data and Document capture solution, and we are planning to integrate with our front end LPA Online tool and our Digital Deputyship service, both on GOV.UK. We are also integrating with GOV.UK platform services. 4. What monitoring stack are OPG using to monitor the Digital Case Management System? We use the elastic stack from elastic.co, sensu and graphite for metrics and pagerduty and pingdom for some external monitoring, although this is limited as Sirius is not publicly available 5. What is the OPG’s approach to user research and user experience and do the OPG wish the suppliers to also provide these resources? We do not require the supplier to provide resource for user research. The OPG already has two user researchers who are integral members of the developement team and who are fully involved in all aspects of the developement work on the product. They have been embedded within the organisation for approximately a year, and initial research around the continuous improvement work on Sirius for Lasting Power of Attorney has already begun. 6. Can further details be provided on the particular non-relational database technologies used by OPG? Sirius doesn't use non relational database technology. On the back end we use postgreSQL. 7. Can further information be given on what automated testing currently exists for assessing non-functional qualities of the live system (e.g. jMeter for performance testing, OWASP ZAP for security testing etc.)? Our concentration is on the application layer. We have a dedicated DevOps team that deals with our non-functional requirements. The functional testing for the applications are as follows: PHPunit for unit tests, Behat for back end tests, Jasmine for front end unit tests and Protractor for end-to-end testing. Automated testing is run when a build is triggered in the CI pipeline. 8. What particular level of the WCAG guidelines does the system currently target (e.g. A, AA or AAA)? The system currently targets AA as a baseline, but we aspire towards AAA.