Home Office Biometrics (HOB) – DevOps - Platform Development and 3rd Line Support

Tender description

Why the Work is Being Done HOB Programme delivers future biometric IT services to various government departments including Home Office departments and Law Enforcement agencies. Consumers use the biometric services to support various business processes for immigration, law enforcement and citizenship. The services run on the platform provided and managed by the DevOps Tooling Platform service. HADES is HOB Application Development & Environment Service for the HOB Programme providing a single window for application development and delivery, environment management and live service support. Within HADES the DevOps structure as scrums is designed to meet the requirements of both Agile Platform Development and 3rd Line Support. Problem to Be Solved To provide, design, develop and maintain the platform to support HOB applications including 3rd Line Support and support for all successor platform arrangements and migrations between platforms. DevOps in HOB context is the design, provision and maintenance of platforms for HOB applications and the design, provision and maintenance of the tools which facilitate the continuous development, continuous integration and continuous delivery of both software and platforms. The goal of DevOps is to bring development, platforms and operations together enabling fast, frequent delivery of change in order to help HOB responds in more agile manner to the changing business need. Who Are the Users Include: 1. HOB Application Developers will use the platform to develop and deploy the application codes. 2. HO Test users will use the platform to perform testing and also to deploy to the environment. 3. L2 support users will deploy the latest releases on the production system and also provide second line support. 4. Wider HOB users, Application Developers and Testers will use the collaborative toolsets. 5. External systems will connect to the platform to perform business transactions. Business users will use the platform to perform business transactions. The DevOps supplier will only interact with users 1. to 5. above. Early Market Engagement The approach including the technology road map was briefed to potential suppliers at the HOB supplier days in July 2015 and April 2016. Engagement with the biometric supplier marketplace has also been made by HOB through two market surveys. DevOps elements were included in this engagement. Work Already Done A number of services are already live including the Biometric Services Gateway and several services are under development including international data sharing capabilities and additional APIs. The DevOps Tooling Platform service will need to take on and manage the platform in support of the existing live services and also transition the work in progress for the in-flight projects. The development tooling and pipeline is already in place in support of the existing IaaS supplier. It is anticipated that the development pipeline and tooling would need to be changed in order to support the transition to a new IaaS supplier. Existing Team The supplier will be working with the existing HOB Technical Design Authority, Business Design Authority, Commercial Design Authority and Test Design & Consultancy Services. The supplier will also be required to work with external delivery and support suppliers, including existing application development and IaaS suppliers, for the new developments and changes to existing systems and work with the incumbent DevOps Tooling supplier to achieve a smooth handover. Current Phase Live Work Location The HOB project team is predominantly based in London within the M25 (East Croydon) and Birmingham. Stakeholders are based all over the UK. Development and support must be conducted on-site with engagement with the project teams, other suppliers and users. Support for testing will need to be conducted in the UK at HOB defined locations include Home Office and police premises. Working Arrangments Working arrangements are expected to be flexible and best configured for the project and supplier teams. The supplier team is expected to be based at our own premises and will also work with the HOB project team and user groups across multiple UK sites; the main sites will be Croydon and Birmingham. The HOB project team will be available during normal UK business hours. On-site testing and any collaborative working (e.g. design, requirements elaboration) will need to be conducted during these hours. Level 3 support needs to be provided outside of these hours. Security Clearance The supplier shall apply employee screening controls including verification of: - Identity - Nationality and Immigration Status - Employment history - Criminal History - SC level security clearance required for access to Home Office facilities/deliverables. NPPV-3 is also required for some roles. Additional T&Cs DOS2 Framework terms and conditions shall apply subject to any elaborations or clarifications and additional terms and conditions identified at ITT stage for shortlisted suppliers. Main charging approach: • Fixed charge per Story Point delivered, based on vendor’s costs for their team and agreed number of Story Points to be delivered. • Delivery in fortnightly Agile Sprints for specified Epics/User Stories. • Number of Story Points for specified Epics/User Stories to be estimated using a Baseline set of User Story examples. Other approaches at Customer’s option: • Fixed price for deliverable(s). • Capped T&M. • T&M. • Mixture of above. Skills & Experience Experience of delivering and supporting platforms for high availability applications providing security sensitive services to meet the platform requirements. Testing methods, specifically around platform build automation Experience of providing a level 3 platform support service with supporting ITIL processes operating in UK business hours and 24 x 7 out of hours support. Experience of providing platform development using Public Cloud Hosting (specify). Experience of migrating environments between different Cloud Hosting platforms (specify). Experience of providing platform development in fortnightly Sprints on an Agile Story Point basis. Experience of developing continuous software delivery pipeline using tools such as Jenkins, Stash, Nexus Experience in configuration management using tools such as Puppet, Ansible Experience of managing Linux and Windows based systems. Well versed with collaborative tool Confluence, Jira and Crowd Extensive experience in the DevOps domain and should be able to advise HOB on best practices. Operation of secure development environments. Nice to Haves Experience of working in relevant business domains i.e. immigration and law enforcement. Experience of working in a multiple supplier delivery regime whereby a separate supplier is integrating the application into the end user compute platform and operating the live service. Experience of working with an external “client side” technical design authority. Experience of charging for platform development on a fixed Agile Story Point basis. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria Tooling and integration Delivery Capability – Environment Build & Test (EBT) Support Capability – Level 2 support to dev/test environments and Level 3 support to production Resourcing table and CVs - core team roles Transition and Exit On-boarding new projects Security Management Experience working with public sector organisations. Ability to work collaboratively with key stakeholders Collaboration Approach Price Cultural Fit Criteria Experience working with public sector organisations. Ability to work collaboratively with key stakeholders. Collaboration Approach: the supplier’s approach to collaboration across a HOB multi-supplier service delivery environment on the basis of the following collaborative behaviours: o Collaborative Intention o Openness o Self-accountability o Self-awareness and awareness of others o Promoting value o Forward looking o Problem-solving and negotiation o Identify risks and issues o Integration Payment Approach Fixed price Assessment Method Written proposal Case study Work history Reference Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 10% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers Budget range up to £4.7m ex vat including expenses.