A discovery phase for the creation of a directory of services

Tender description

Summary of the work A discovery phase for the creation of a directory of services, which can be largely automatically updated. Expected Contract Length 2 months Latest start date Monday 12 February 2018 Budget Range £25,000 - £30,000 excluding VAT Why the Work is Being Done Hackney Council and its health and voluntary sector partners have various needs and obligations to maintain directories of services. This is currently done manually reducing the value of the directories and fragmenting the experience for users. We want to understand the scope for a single directory of service which relies predominantly on automatic updates. Problem to Be Solved The council has statutory obligations, such as the need to maintain a Local Offer for families with a child who has special educational needs or disabilities and the need to maintain a directory of care services for adults. In addition, it provides signposting for people in housing need. Recent work to support people with mental health highlighted the value of a directory of services. Most of these are manually updated, infrequently, and often signpost to similar community groups and local services. Who Are the Users As a service user, I need access to a directory of local services that might be of benefit so that I can access additional help As a service provider, I need to provide a directory of local services and groups so that service users can benefit from non statutory services. As a service provider I want it to be easy to ensure my details are correct and up to date so that local people can access my service As a third party developer, I need easily to connect to local services so that I can add value to local services. Work Already Done The council provides hackneyicare.org.uk - a directory of local services, whilst the GP Confederation has developed an app to support people with mental health needs, which requires a directory of local services. Existing Team There is no in-house team dedicated to this project - however, it will be facilitated by a part time project manager. Current Phase Discovery Skills & Experience • Provide a multi-disciplinary team, including user research, service design and front-end developer • Adopt user-centred design and Agile approaches, consistent with the govenrment’s service design manual • Have experience of designing a directory that consumes third party APIs and provides API endpoints • Be agnostic of any particular software, enabling us to consider a range of options to meet user needs • Share their work freely and openly with the Council and the wider community Nice to Haves • Be able to meet the Local Government Digital Service Standard • Experience of a similar project Work Location Hackney Council offices in Mare Street, E8 Working Arrangments We would expect the supplier to be onsite for sprint planning and show & tells and to visit the GP Confederation and other locations where required for the user research No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Understanding of user needs from the service • Clarity of the approach • Experience from an analogous project • Team structure, including skills, experiences and relevance of individuals • Identification of risks and plan to mitigate them Cultural Fit Criteria • Work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers • Be transparent and collaborative when making decisions • Share knowledge and experience with team members and the wider service Payment Approach Capped time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 5% Price 35% Questions from Suppliers 1. What would you expect the output of this programme to be? (final deliverables) - list of categories of data that would feed the directory, and sources for these data- initial assessment of the technical feasibility of linking to these sources- identification of data that might be manually inputted and initial technical assessment of how this would be supported- high-level identification of the types of data cleansing / matching required- identification of the APIs and documentation that would be required to support third party developers- identification of the team and budget required to take the work to the next phase 2. As part of the discovery phase – would you expect to take part in research? e.g., Service providers, third-party developers end-users We have three types of users envisaged for primary research in Discovery: service users, small voluntary organisations and third party developers. We also expect Discovery to involve secondary research of data providers and standard (eg Google, OpenActive etc) 3. Would the supplier be responsible for recruiting users to participate in primary research or would the Council facilitate this? We would expect to identify the users to participate in the research.