Beta: Get School Experience Service

Tender description

Summary of the work Beta phase: co-located agile team required to build and implement a school experience service, which will be used by people considering a career in teaching to secure a school experience placement. The service must meet the digital service standard including the reuse of common platforms. Expected Contract Length 24 weeks maximum. Latest start date Monday 10 December 2018 Budget Range Suppliers should propose the timescales for building and implementing the MVS based on the user needs provided with clearly defined resources and costs. We expect to start w/c 10 December and the beta to take a maximum of 24 weeks. There is no separate budget for travel and user recruitment. All costs should be included and detailed in the overall cost. The supplier may be asked to provide support and maintenance for the public beta service after go-live. Why the Work is Being Done The alpha confirmed user needs and a potential minimal viable service (MVS) We are asking suppliers to propose a beta plan, demonstrating how the (MVS) can be delivered, with clearly defined team resources, timescales and costs. The contract for the current service, hosted, owned and managed by a third party supplier, ends on 31 March 2019. It will be replaced by this new service, owned and managed by DfE. (MVS) details are available via supplier questions and must be ready to launch on 1 April 2019. Problem to Be Solved A strategic priority is to recruit and retain a supply of high quality teachers. Getting school experience is an important step for candidates who are considering a career in teaching. Our research shows that finding and arranging suitable local experience is challenging for potential teachers. In addition managing the demand on them for school experience, and the need to continue to recruit teachers is also a challenge for schools. The new service aims to remove the pain-points for candidates and schools in order to improve the user experience and increase the number of schools offering placements. Who Are the Users As a potential teacher, I need to make an informed decision about whether the career is for me, and gain the experience needed to make a successful application for initial teacher training. As a school that hosts school experience, I need to be able to manage the demand for placements and ensure candidates that spend time in my school are suitable. As a DfE staff member, I need to be able to access data to: monitor the performance of the service, continually improve the service, understand candidate and school decisions and behaviour, and inform offline work to stimulate school supply. Work Already Done An 8 week discovery was completed, followed by an 8 week alpha. The alpha outputs include: detailed user stories, user research outputs (Personas/Anti Personas, Process Maps, User Journeys, report), iterated prototypes, technical architecture (high level design, integration points etc). More detail available via supplier questions. Existing Team Product Manager (full time) who completed the discovery and alpha. Current Phase Alpha Skills & Experience • Proven experience of delivering transactional digital services using an agile approach. • Experience of designing and developing beta services that meet both identified user needs and strategic objectives and follow GOV.UK design patterns including meet accessibility standards. • Ability to provide a coach and demonstrate your approach to upskilling the product manager. • Proven experience of prioritising key content and features using metrics, analytics and user feedback - explaining how this will ensure the successful delivery of this service. • Experience of designing services to ‘AA’ of the W3C WCAG2.0 accessibility standards (including compatible with the latest Assistive Technologies: JAWS, Zoomtext, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and Dolphin Supernova). • Have experience of delivering high-quality content and information architecture design for complex user journeys across multiple touchpoints that meet user needs. • Experience of assessing and mitigating security and privacy issues and ensuring GDPR compliance. • Cyber Essentials certified or equivalent such as ISO27001. • Understanding of non-functional requirements and experience of building these into a digital service i.e. usability, security, accessibility, interoperability, reliability, maintainability, availability, scalability, portability and compatibility. • The facility to capture and provide auditing information on user (and automated processing) activity within the system. • Have significant experience of conducting user research and usability testing sessions (on a range of devices, face to face and remote) based on a robust methodology. • Have experience of recruiting user research participants (including users with accessibility and assisted digital needs) Nice to Haves • Successfully meeting the Government Service Standard in previous deliveries. • Recent examples of using the styles, components and patterns in the gov.uk design system. • Recent experience of using common platforms, specifically Gov.uk Notify. • Experience of integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365. • Experience of building a booking system or reusing code that does this. • Experience of leading, coaching and upskilling people in agile methods and techniques in order to build internal capability. Work Location DfE Piccadilly Gate Store Street Manchester M1 2WD Working Arrangments Co-located working on site at DfE's Manchester office, maximising opportunity for engagement with DfE users and stakeholders. Some limited travel to other DfE sites. Operate using agile methodologies: daily stand-ups, sprint planning, sprints, retrospectives, show and tells etc. Supplier will lead by being a role model in agile working. They will need to collaborate and invest time in knowledge sharing and coaching to increase DfE staff capability. A specific requirement is to coach the DfE Product Manager. Security Clearance BPSS (Baseline Personnel Security Standard) clearance is required for all team members. This will need to be in place before the start of the beta (expected w/c 10 December). We will consider suppliers without security clearance, and provide support to gain clearance. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Evidence of understanding the user needs and the problem to be solved. • Evidence of how the MVS will be built and implemented within appropriate timescales. The proposal should include a beta plan with clearly defined activities, deliverables and costs. • Identification of an appropriate team with relevant skills and experiences, profiled and costed throughout the beta build and implementation. • Beta experience - recent examples of where the supplier has taken alpha outputs and built and implemented a beta service to GDS service standards. • Value for money - provide evidence of how you will ensure value for money for this project. • Explain your approach to identifying and managing risks within the project. • Demonstrate approach to minimise the cost of maintaining and further developing the service post beta go-live. Cultural Fit Criteria • Evidence of working within Government on digital projects with a strong policy component and ability to work with policy colleagues new to agile ways of working. • Explain how the supplier will work with non-technical staff to understand requirements. • Explain how the supplier will onboard people during delivery to ensure little delay to team velocity both before and after they join the team. • Evidence of a collaborative approach, demonstrating how the supplier will upskill DfE staff, specifically the Product Manager, and approach wider stakeholder engagement. Payment Approach Capped time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 20% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. Is it possible to share the 1) Discovery document, 2) prototype access 3) Technical Architecture and 4) Journey map? There is not one document summarising discovery findings, but the high level user stories, technical architecture and a high level illustration of the service can be provided to all supliers by email request to Jacqueline.Cunliffe@education.gov.uk. Prototype access will be provided to shortlisted suppliers.All documents are provided on a confidential basis and should not be shared. 2. to allow us to properly scope the Beta delivery – can we have access to the details of the MVS (as suggested in the scope) and also to the user research around user stories etc. MVP flow diagram, along with a list of the user stories are available to all suppliers by request to email Jacqueline.Cunliffe@education.gov.uk.All documents are provided on a confidential basis and should not be shared. 3. Can the alpha output be shared please? High level user stories 2) MVP flow diagram 3) Technical architecture and 4) A high-level illustration of the service attached are available to all suppliers by email request to Jacqueline.Cunliffe@education.gov.uk 4. They asked: To allow us to properly scope the Beta delivery – can we have access to the details of the MVS (as suggested in the scope) and also to the user research around user stories etc. High level user stories 2) MVP flow diagram 3) Technical architecture and 4) A high-level illustration of the service are available to all suppliers by email request to Jacqueline.Cunliffe@education.gov.uk 5. They asked: What is the nature of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration you require? What role does Dynamics have now and how do you expect it to operate within the new service? Is it the CRM in the technical architecture document and is the integration limited to extracting candidate email addresses? No current dynamics integration. Our plan is that the new service will pull and pull data from/to the Dynamics CRM. 6. They asked: The technical architecture diagram supplied shows Azure database services being used. Has the selection of Azure as the cloud platform already been made or can other platforms such as AWS been used to deliver the service? The decision has been made. 7. They asked: What roles do you envisage DFE will provide within the team. DfE will provide a full time product manager (who was also PM or the alpha and discovery), part time associated delivery manager support and subject knowledge experts. 8. They asked: Do you have a budget range for the work. We will be assessing the quality and value for money of delivery proposals. An approximate budget is in the range of £800,000 to £1.2m. 9. They asked: Please can you confirm what budget range has been allocated for this work? We will be assessing the quality and value for money of delivery proposals. An approximate budget is in the range of £800,000 to £1.2m. 10. Is it possible to share the 1) Discovery document, 2) prototype access 3) Technical Architecture and 4) Journey map? High level user stories 2) MVP flow diagram 3) technical architecture and 4) A high-level illustration of the service attached are available by email request to Jacqueline.Cunliffe@education.gov.uk 11. They asked: Will the users (potential teachers, school & DfE staff) be available for user/usability testing? Or, do suppliers have to arrange on their own?If required, will participants be made available for further user research? The beta team will be responsible for recruiting users for research and usability testing. In discovery and alpha, this has including using a combination of DfE networks/channels and external resource for hard to recruit users. All recruitment costs should be included in the proposal. 12. They asked: Are all the members who would support in Beta like DM, SME experienced in Agile? This is understand if a dedicated Agile coach would be required in supplier team. The DfE PM has been product manager through discovery and alpha, but there is an expectation of appropriate coaching support for them. 13. They asked: Assuming software cost (if required) and cloud related cost like environments/services to support Beta (dev/test etc.) will not be included in the project budget. Please confirm. All costs should be included in the proposals. 14. They asked: Does the scope of work include infrastructure setup like dev/test environments, software/cloud services etc for carrying out Beta activities? Assuming all these would be ready before 10th December when beta-delivery team starts. Yes they will be in place for the start of Beta. 15. They asked:Has the decision on which tools/technologies/softwares/programming language already been decided or supplier has to propose? Response (1 of 3)DfE digital is working to create a consistent technology stack and approach across the teaching service lines. As such we would expect suppliers to comply with these standards or to engage with architecture and service leads to approve any deviations on a case-by-case basis. Our technology stack and approach consists of the following elements:Microservices architecture, with internal HTTP and JSON REST based APIs for business logic and data access. 16. They asked:Has the decision on which tools/technologies/softwares/programming language already been decided or supplier has to propose? Response (2 of 3)User facing websites built using Ruby on Rails, and deployed to the DfE Azure platform as a service (Azure AppService). Where possible we would encourage the use of Ruby as the core language for all the microservices on the system, hosted on the DfE Azure PaaS provided.Code hosted in the DfE Digital github repository, and the builds to be done via Travis-CI.Databases to be one of the provided managed databases on DfE Azure such as Postgres. 17. They asked:Has the decision on which tools/technologies/softwares/programming language already been decided or supplier has to propose? Response (3 of 3)All services that need to integrate to DfE existing systems, such as CRMs, Legacy data stores or external reporting systems would be expected to use an "anti-corruption layer" architecture consisting of microservice that handles the integration APIs and keep the complexity or implementation details out of the core business logic.Implementation of the technology stack to be configured using code rather than hand rolled and use Terraform as the preferred configuration system.