WP 11 QA & Core Systems ADM Partner

Tender description

Why the Work is Being Done Our primary roles are: • deliver financial support to eligible students pursuing higher education; • pay Higher Education Institutions public contribution towards tuition fees for England, Wales and Northern Ireland; • supply information needed by HMRC to ensure repayments are collected on time those due to repay under the Income Contingent Repayment Loan Scheme; • manage direct collection of repayments for loans granted under former Mortgage Style Loan Scheme. * undertake specific tasks for individual Devolved Administrations e.g. payment of Education Maintenance Allowances, and * administration and payment of bursaries and scholarships to higher education institutions throughout UK. Problem to Be Solved SLC is progressing several initiatives within its Core Systems development and Quality Assurance landscape, including Repayments, Digital Customer and Digital Architecture strategies, that will implement improved Repayments capabilities, modernisation of Digital Architecture, and deeper Partner engagement strategies, to support outcome based working. This will contribute to a 3 year programme, with expected benefits in excess of £900m. The existing development and Quality Assurance capability is provided by approximately one third in-house and two thirds supplier staff. Who Are the Users As an internal assessor within SLC I need to, on behalf of applicants, ascertain eligibility and entitlement for repayment, payment and lending capabilities, so that the appropriate processes and capabilities are in place in support of study. Early Market Engagement Yes. Information will be made available to bidders selected to shorlisting under NDA rules. Work Already Done None, multiple existing projects are underway, with a range of suppliers and partner delivery models. Existing Team The team is a multi-disciplinary team made up largely of developers, testers and business analysts supported by technical and business design leads, project management and user acceptance test consultants.The Supplier will work in a mixed team of full time SLC staff and other suppliers. There are incumbent suppliers who will continue to be in place dependent on demand levels, and the ability to supply niche skills. All parties involved in the delivery are expected to operate in a collaborative manner while adopting the processes and working practices already established within the team. Current Phase Beta Work Location Glasgow (multiple sites) Working Arrangments There will be several projects (SoWs) for each phase of the delivery lifecycle, which will run in parallel. Consequently, there will be peaks and troughs where the mix of skills and volume of resource will need to be flexible to meet demands. It is envisaged that the initial SoWs will focus on Discovery and BAU activity to develop Knowledge. The team is expected to work across multiple sites as required. Expenses will conform to SLC policies (travel and accommodation only). Relevant Supplier team members are expected to be on site 5 days per week. Security Clearance All Supplier resources must meet the Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS/DS). Some roles may require a higher level (e.g. SC), to be dealt with as required. The Supplier must provide Pre Clearance of Staff before onboarding. Additional T&Cs Proposed individuals who are non British/EEA nationals must either be in possession of leave to remain with no restrictions on their time to live/work in the UK or their leave to remain must be valid for the duration of this award and permit work in this capacity. Monthly financial reporting reconciled to a SFIA skill matrix. Monthly expense reconciliation. Fortnightly and Monthly progress reporting against planned deliverables and fortnightly supplier KPI/SLA reporting. Skills & Experience 1. The Supplier must evidence experience of delivering services and solutions in the public sector and Financial Services Market of similar size and complexity, specifically: - Core application development and maintenance (ADM) Service (including DevOps, testing, Project Management and QA) sourced optionally (and at the client's direction) from onshore, offshore or nearshore capabilities. - Demand Management, Resource Management, Planning, Change management, Delivery performance management, Quality Management, Account Management, Knowledge Transfer etc. Governance Services (included at no additional cost to SLC) -Full service operation - E2E application delivery and management (including design,test and architecture services) -Transition of existing activities with no disruption to project delivery; Transition Service; Handover to SLC team or alternate supplier to Maintain on completion of project engagements -Elicitation and informing strategic options, solution design, solution architecture - Strategy and Design Service -Programme, project and delivery quality management - Programme, Project and Delivery Management Service -Legacy Migration and Remediation Service (including service orientation of message based systems); Migration of applications and services to the Cloud; Cloud Migration Service -Data Management, data integration, data modelling, data architecture, data integrity, database management, data mining, big data - Data Service -Multi-platform, multi-operating system, multi-database environments including open source, Cloud, on-premise, noSQL etc - Platform Services -Service design, service management, service integration, end user support, training, end-user provisioning, solution integration, service tooling, security tooling etc - Solution Integration Service -Inbound and Outbound communications technologies (including scanning, workflow, electronic correspondence, document storage, document formatting) 2. The Supplier must evidence ability to drive forward existing complex architectures, balancing competing demands of challenging delivery, with effective management of technical debt, and achieving key strategic objectives. 3. The Supplier must evidence experience of working on systems heavily integrated into a complex legacy estate, involving heterogenous platforms and different delivery methodologies. 4. The Supplier must provide evidence of a track record of building complex microservice, service orientated and event based architectures 5. The Supplier must evidence experience of operating at scale and effectively prioritising and managing significant backlogs of work across a number of Agile delivery teams, including knowledge sharing/transfer. 6. The Supplier must evidence operating in a DevOps culture to deliver effective Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, infrastructure automation, test automation and application monitoring leading to tangible business benefits. 7. The Supplier must evidence working in a partnership, in particular assisting SLC to mentor and train graduate and apprentice resources. 8. The Supplier must evidence how it drives long term retention of UK resident resources to achieve quality and consistency of delivery whilst meeting HMG security requirements. Nice to Haves 1. The supplier must evidence experience and challenges of onshore development vs near-shore development vs offshore development with blended approaches, and highlight successful models. 2. The Supplier must evidence experience and challenges of Development and Architecture Approaches: SOA, Microservice Architecture, RESTful Web service development etc 3. The Supplier must evidence experience and challenges of Database Development: Relational databases ( e.g. Oracle 10i, 12c), noSQL databases (e.g. MongoDb). 4. The Supplier must evidence experience and anticipated or previous challenges of SLC's Development Languages: PL/SQL, Java, ( and its development frameworks such as Spring, React, Angular etc). 5.The Supplier must confirm that it will adhere to Agile principles, align to the Government Digital Services (GDS) Digital By Default Service Standards No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria The Supplier must provide evidence of ability and experience of successfully providing services to the following areas in delivering complex solutions to the public sector in policy driven environments. The Supplier should also describe how it will provide the services below and where applicable include details of relevant services using alternative delivery locations (local delivery centres/onshore/nearshore/offshore. 1) Delivery: Core application development and maintenance (ADM) Service (including DevOps, testing, Project Management and QA) sourced optionally (and at the client's direction) from onshore, offshore or nearshore capabilities.(15%) - Demand Management, Resource Management, Planning, Change Management, Delivery Performance Management, Quality Management, Account Management, Knowledge Transfer etc - Governance Services - Transition of existing activities with no disruption to project delivery - Transition Service - Elicitation and informing strategic options, solution design, solution architecture - Strategy and Design Service - Programme, project and delivery quality management - Programme and Delivery Management Service 2) Technical: Legacy Migration and Re-mediation Service - Migration of applications and services to the Cloud - Cloud Migration Service (10%) -Inbound and Outbound communications technologies (including scanning, workflow, electronic correspondence, document storage, document formatting) - Data Management, data integration, data modelling, data architecture, data integrity, database management, data mining, big data - Data Service - End User Provisioning Services - Multi-platform, multi-operating system, multi-database environments including open source, Cloud, NoSQL etc - Platform Services 3) Service: Service design, service management, service integration, end user support, training, solution integration, service tooling, security tooling etc - Solution Integration Service (5%) 4) Security: Authentication, encryption, identity and access management, security clearances, data handling etc - Security Service (5%) 5) The Supplier must provide evidence of transition planning, management, working with existing suppliers without disrupting delivery, and their high level approach to the Discovery phases for these activities (20%) 6) The Supplier must evidence ability to drive forward existing complex architectures, balancing competing demands of challenging delivery schedules with effective management of technical debt and achieving strategic objectives. (10%) 7) The Supplier must evidence experience of working on heavily integrated complex legacy estate, involving heterogenous platforms and different delivery methodologies, and describe their approach to ensure success. (10%) 8) The Supplier must provide evidence of a track record of building complex microservice, service orientated and event based solutions, and describe their approach. (10%) 9) The Supplier must evidence experience of operating at scale and effectively prioritising and managing significant backlogs of work across a number of agile delivery teams, including knowledge sharing/transfer. (5%) 10) The Supplier must evidence operating in a DevOps culture to deliver effective Continuous Integration/Delivery, infrastructure/test automation and application monitoring leading to the delivery of tangible business benefits. (10%) Cultural Fit Criteria 1. Describe your management processes and mitigation's for poor service delivery, escalation processes, staff handover, turnover, quality maintenance and corrective actions that will deliver this managed service. 2. Describe how good performance will be incentivised to ensure milestones are delivered on time. 3. Describe how outcome based services will be managed and tracked throughout their teams. 4. Describe how knowledge management and knowledge transfer processes will be operated 5. Describe your resourcing strategy for engagement whilst delivering the service including composition of workforce (eg % of associates/permanent etc) and how this may change overtime. 6. Describe your engagement strategy for working in multi-partner environment, and working in as sub partner to inhouse teams, especially in Design Leadership 7. Describe how you will partner with SLC to support training and mentoring of new SLC hires, sharing of induction programmes/onboarding etc. 8. Describe your retention strategies for top performers,technical career paths for associates,promotion policies and career expectation management 9. Identify the overall attrition levels that can be expected and your policy for rotation of resources between different client accounts 10. For your resources that are multicultural, how the vacation profiles will be arranged with different holiday priorities, such as Diwali 11. Describe your security process, controls and assurance for any client data, when work will be done in non SLC locations. 12. Describe how you will engage and manage other third party suppliers or independent contractors to cover niche skills or time constraints, in order to provide flex in the workforce 13. Describe your Account and Relationship management practices, and approach for delivering this service. Payment Approach Time and materials Assessment Method Written proposal Case study Work history Reference Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 50% Cultural fit 20% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers Budget range estimated budget up to £20m in first two years. work will be split up into specific statements of work to support required delivery activity with approved funding for each.