Get School Experience Service: Public Beta - Live

Tender description

Summary of the work Live Public Beta phase: a multi-disciplinary, co-located agile team required to develop and maintain the public beta Get School Experience public beta service into live running. Expected Contract Length 5 August - 31 March 2020. Circa 7.5 months Latest start date Monday 5 August 2019 Budget Range Up to approximately £700,000 (exc VAT). Why the Work is Being Done DfE is responsible for ensuring that there are sufficient teachers throughout the country. Teacher recruitment is challenging, and a top education priority. To this aim, we have developed a new Get School Experience service which has taken over from the School Experience Programme (SEP) School experience is important for people looking to become teachers as they can use it to find out what teaching is like before deciding to pursue it as a career. We aim to launch the next phase of live Public Beta by 19 August 2019. Problem to Be Solved It is hard for potential teachers to find and secure school experience. It is hard for the schools that offer school experience to manage the demand for, and organise school experience. 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 We have completed a 6 week discovery then 12 week alpha, gaining approval at GDS service assessment to proceed to beta. The MVP Get School Experience service is currently in private beta with GDS public beta service assessment scheduled in August. Existing Team There is a DfE product manager. Handover would be from a multi-disciplinary agile service team (suppliers). There would be regular working with DfE technical teams. Current Phase Beta Skills & Experience • Expertise in writing, testing and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications. • Azure Dev OPs experience. • Knowledge of PostgreSQL. • 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 DfE staff. • 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. • 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 leading, coaching and upskilling people in agile methods and techniques in order to build internal capability. Work Location Piccadilly Gate Store Street Manchester M1 2WD Working Arrangments 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. 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 Public Live Beta (expected w/c 5 August). We will consider suppliers without security clearance, and provide support to gain clearance. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Evidence of understanding user needs and the problem to be solved. • Evidence of how the service will be iterated and improved 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 • Experience of working within government departments that are yet to fully embrace agile ways of working, or are new to digital delivery. • Experience of working in multidisciplinary Agile teams within Government. • Experience of working with operational delivery and policy colleagues, and communicating effectively with key stakeholders and users. Payment Approach Capped time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 20% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. Who is the incumbent Supplier? The incumbent supplier details of the previously awarded opportunity may be found at: https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcomes-and-specialists/opportunities/8139 2. Please can you tell us if there is an incumbent supplier who will be eligible to bid for this work? During a live procurement, we are not in a position to know or comment on whether the incumbent is planning to bid. 3. Do you require the team to work from your offices or can we work remotely from our own? There is a requirement that the team will be centrally based in the DfE Manchester office. Some remote working will be acceptable as an exception, with prior agreement by the DfE Product Manager, and as long as project outcomes are not affected. 4. Can you please share your expected timeline for notifying shortlisted suppliers, submission of the written proposal and presentation? Please note that the following dates are indicative and could be subject to change:5th July - Notify shortlisted suppliers;12th July - Deadline to receive written proposal and presentation;w/c 15th July (most likely to be Wednesday 17th July) - Face to face presentation interviews.