Discovery and development of an MVP to enable tenants to track a DLO repair

Tender description

Summary of the work Discovery and development of an MVP to enable tenants to track a DLO repair Latest start date Monday 14 January 2019 Budget Range £65,000 - £85,000 Why the Work is Being Done Track a Repair enables Hackney Council staff to see the actions and timescales associated with a repair and possibly related jobs. It has been designed to support the leaks hub. The data only enables the council to track in detail jobs being performed by its Direct Labour Organisation (DLO). The Repairs Contact Centre receives 70,000 follow-up calls per year. The average call currently costs about £9. If we can reduce these by 7,000 per year then this service would achieve a return on investment within the first 12 months of operation. Problem to Be Solved Tenants currently have no means of knowing what’s happening to the progress of their repair other than calling the contact centre. Some of those repairs are undertaken by third party contractors where the council does not have detailed information available but 70,000 repairs are done by its in-house organisation. A single repair may require multiple jobs to be performed, which also adds to the complexity for tenants. Who Are the Users As a tenant, I need to easily track a repair so that I can do it at my convenience. As a tenant I need to be available when a repair operative visits so that the repair can be undertaken Work Already Done This work is being commissioned alongside work to extend the features of Track a Repair to support the Repairs Contact Centre. ‘Report a Repair’ is already working effectively online. A summary of Track a Repair is available here: https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcomes-and-specialists/opportunities/6397 And the Repairs API: http://api.hackney.gov.uk/swagger/#/Repairs Existing Team 1 x Delivery Manager 1 x Product Owner 1 x API developer Current Phase Not started Skills & Experience • Provide a multi-disciplinary team, including user research, service design, front-end and back-end developers • Demonstrate a track-record of user-centred design and Agile approaches • Have delivered a service that’s been assessed against a government service standard • Demonstrate experience designing services for a wide range of digital skills and confidence • Be able to build or design a tool that’s so good, people prefer to use it • Have experience of working to the GDS service design manual • Consume from and present to Hackney’s emerging API layer • Experience of developing design patterns that can be re-used for other services • Have experience working with social housing providers or repairs providers • Have experience working with Universal Housing Nice to Haves Show how it has supported development of an in-house team Work Location Initially at Hackney Council offices, 1 Hillman Street, E8 1DY Working Arrangments We would prefer a team onsite for 3 days a week, most weeks in order to engage with subject matter experts and ICT, building broader engagement with the style of working (eg through show and tells). No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Understanding of user needs from the service • Clarity of the approach • Experience from a similar 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 • Have a no-blame culture and encourage people to learn from their mistakes • Take responsibility for their work • Share knowledge and experience with team members and the wider service • Work openly • Hackney Council is a diverse organisation, reflecting the diversity of our borough. Describe how you would work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers in a diverse environment. Payment Approach Capped time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 7% Price 33% Questions from Suppliers 1. Is there any implicit constraint on location of suppliers? Do they have to be in the London region? No 2. Regarding the application questions for "Essentials Skills and Experience", is Hackney Council able to clarify the evaluation criteria, when one of the requirements is not full field by the supplier? For example, if the supplier has "no experience with working to the GDS service design manual", will this disqualify the supplier immediately? As it is criteria listed under 'Essential Skills & Experience' then this requirement would need to be fulfilled by the supplier. If they are unable to fulfil this then the supplier would be disqualified immediately. 3. While a step in the right direction, the GDS is still quite an immature Agile process (much of it was created to bridge the cognitive gap between classical approaches and modern Agile methods in a short space of time). The net result is better suppliers are way ahead of the method, and to go back to GDS would be a regression. Hence, is the requirement for experience of GDS, fixed? For example, are better methods out? Are better suppliers out? Yes as the requirement 'Have experience of working to the GDS service design manual' is listed under 'Essential Skills and Experience'. Therefore we we would need suppliers to demonstrate how they meet that requirement. 4. Have delivered a service that’s been assessed against a government service standard" This requirement under mandatory responses makes it difficult for a new supplier to meet eligibility. However, if there is experience of delivering solutions which match those requirements, will a new supplier have a similar chance of getting shortlisted? As it is criteria listed under 'Essential Skills & Experience' then this requirement would need to be fulfilled by the supplier. If they are unable to fulfil this then the supplier would be disqualified immediately. 5. Are you open to discussion about working on-site. We are happy to come to Hackney for regular (weekly) meetings and we work to agile principles, but we prefer to work at our office (central London). The opportunity states that we would prefer a team onsite for at least 3 days a week. We could discuss once supplier has been selected. 6. Given this project comprises discovery and alpha phases, if the discovery phase recommends that this project either isn't technical viable or there is no tangible value in progressing to the next stage, will you be happy to stop this work? We would consider all recommendations 7. Are you only accepting/considering tenders from companies that have previously worked with Universal Housing? We've built online customer ticketing and tracking software before for housing providers, but we've not worked with Universal Housing. Does this mean we're excluded? As it is criteria listed under 'Essential Skills & Experience' then this requirement would need to be fulfilled by the supplier. If they are unable to fulfil this then the supplier would be disqualified immediately. 8. The budget seems quite low to complete discovery and alpha phases. Can you please confirm how you arrived at the published figure? The budget has been designed around what we already know and the expected benefits. 9. The mentioned "Existing Team" will work closely with the supplier team on this project, right? If yes, can you please provide us with details of the expected responsibilities, like a RACI matrix for the roles associated with this "Existing team"? This will be for the successful supplier to work with the existing team to define responsibilities. 10. Has the contract with the supplier for the improvements ended? Yes 11. According to the opportunity details "This work is being commissioned alongside work to extend the features of Track a Repair to support the Repairs Contact Centre. ‘Report a Repair’ is already working effectively online". Is Hackney Council considering to develop these new functionalities within the existing "Report a Repair" platform or any other? Vendors should check the existing code on Github. Report a Repair is not really a platform. We do believe that the service patterns identified for the contact centre and the APIs and user interfaces for Track a Repair provide the basis for extending the existing functionality of that product for use in the contact centre. 12. Is Hackney Council considering to develop these functionalities using OutSystems technology or other? None of the existing products have been developed on Outsystems 13. Currently, we were not able to access the "Repairs API" link from the opportunity details, is Hackney Council able to provide us with any further documentation regarding this API? Or, the documentation available at GitHub (https://github.com/LBHackney-IT) can be considered sufficient? The link for RepairsAPI github repo is https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/Hackney_Repairs_API/blob/central/README.md 14. Still regarding the application questions for "Essentials Skills and Experience", is Hackney Council able to clarify what kind of experience or skills is expected from the supplier for the line where is mentioned "Consume from and present to Hackney’s emerging API layer"? We are platform agnostic team. As long as you are able to consume/reuse our APIs and create additional APIs to be part of our API architecture or create endpoints in our existing ones. We follow open API standards for eg : Swagger and TDD. With regards to programming languages we currently have APIs written in .NET and Ruby on Rails. More details can be found in below links with regards to our development standards and APIs.Our standards : https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/Hackney-Development-StandardsOur playbook : https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/API-Playbook 15. In the essential skills and experience you ask for potential suppliers to "consume from and present to Hackney’s emerging API layer". Is this a mandatory requirement? In other words, is this opportunity only open to organisations that you have already worked with? Yes it is a mandatory requirement and this opportunity is open to anyone who can meet the criteria listed. 16. What other services are you considering re-using the design patterns for? We are developing a wide range of digital services so unable to specify.