ITS201396-009 SEND Funding Solution

Tender description

Why the Work is Being Done The Council has a DfE mandated responsibility to fairly and equitably distribute Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) funding. £18million is distributed by the Council to children with higher needs in Early Years, Mainstream Schools and Post-16 Settings each year. Funding for Inclusion (FFI) is a point based assessment process created by the Council to help meet this mandate. Between 2000 and 2010 a bespoke application was developed to support FFI assessments. Enhancing or adding functionality is increasingly complex and requires significant effort and cost. The existing application carries significant risks. The Council aims to develop a replacement application. Problem to Be Solved Funding for Inclusion (FFI) is a point based assessment process created by the Council to help meet the DFE mandate to Leeds City Council of fairly distributing SEND funding. Without digital support the process is inefficient and prevents timely payment of funding to parents and carers. The work will create an application capable of automating, tracking and reporting on the FFI assessment and funding process efficiently to ensure timely assessment and payment of funding applications. Who Are the Users FFI Co-Ordinator. Requires ability to track SEND funded pupils in academic settings. Allocates funding units to pupils using established business rules and SEND assessment. Tracks existing budget spend and forecasts future budget spend across all academic settings and individual pupils by calculating budget value of units allocated to pupils. Responds to funding enquiries. Finance Officers. Makes payments to academic settings and indivduals based on FFI Co-Oridnators funding calculations. Academic settings. Informs council of pupils with funding needs. Reports on payments made to pupils in their academic setting. Enquires about funding for individual pupils. Detailed user stories are avalaible on request. Early Market Engagement After carrying out a analysis of the Council’s requirements, an options appraisal was undertaken. Early market engagement with the off-the-shelf providers of SEND products formed part of this options appraisal. Following early market engagement the outcome and agreed option was to custom develop a replacement application. Work Already Done Discovery work has been conducted by the Council which has resulted in a business case, high-level requirements, detailed user stories and solution design work which proposes a custom rebuild using .Net, SQL, existing corporate reporting solutions and live data links with Excel for financial management and forecasting features. All discovery work and high level solutioning work is avalaible on request and assumed as an input to the application development activities. Existing Team Existing team avaliable for project duration: • Internal Project Manager. Works alongside the Contractor PM where overlap/cross-over is identified. • Business Analyst familiar with the discovery work already conducted. • Integration Developer to provide support for integrating with the on premise system the solution requires data from. • Solutions Architect familiar with the high-level design work already conducted. • Lead Development Representative to advise on Council standards and collaborate on developer design choices. • Lead Business Representative familiar with the target business process and a user of the end product. Working collaboratively with the development team during the development lifecycle. Current Phase Not applicable Work Location The Contractor’s team will work remotely. Remote working through appropriate collboaration tooling such as Microsoft Teams, Basecamp and JIRA is assumed. By mutual agreement some team members may attend site at key stages of the work activity e.g. early workshops and to ensure knowledge transfer can take place with Council staff. Council staff are based at either: St George House, 40 Great George Street, Leeds, LS1 3DL or Merrion House, 110 Merrion Centre, Leeds, LS2 8BB. Working Arrangments The Council will make any additional Council resource available for interview/consultation as required during this commission. The Contractor is required to provide a multi-disciplined team to work alongside existing team. Working hours are flexilbe but engagement with council provided resources should be in hours 8am – 6pm GMT. Security Clearance The Council may require DBS checks to be undertaken. The Contractor will adhere to the safeguarding measures and requirements provided by the Council. Safeguarding training may be required. Logins and licences will be provided for Contractors staff to connect to the Council’s network / systems securely to deliver the project. Additional T&Cs Skills & Experience Proven track record of managing agile design and development projects, moving quickly with prototypes and pilots to prove ideas in practice. Familiarity with production and refinement of discovery products e.g. personas, user stories and needs. Experience in creating functional proof of concepts; performing user testing; identifying technical and implementation challenges. Experience in creating production ready solution using secure development practices addressing process or technical related challenges, coordinating user testing & iteration. Experience in the handover and deployment of production ready solutions. Proven track record in projects requiring support handover for operation by customer. Experience in the management and organisation of agile developments. Ability to organise developments from design and user requirements presenting agile sprint plans, ordering product development backlogs and reporting on development progress. Ability to communicate project progress and manage resources in a extended teams to achieve on-time delivery of minimal viable products. Proven track record of delivery of development projects requiring interface with existing organisations design, technical, and project management teams. Delivery of a quality coded products using Microsoft Development Stack (.Net core, MVC,SQL, Power BI, SRSS). Establish complimentary DevOps method and utilise development tooling to that of the Councils [MS SQL, Azure DevOps, Visual Studio, C#, JS5, HTML5, CSS3, .net Core, Selenium, Git, Markdown Syntax, Specflow]. Design, build and enhance Products in secure, ‘open’, loosely coupled ways so that they or their component parts can be shared and reused Experience with developments requiring integration with existing back office systems. Follow a strict Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) approach to software development and that includes rigorous and comprehensive testing preferably automated. Experience working with automated regression test suites, Developing User Acceptance Test (UAT) Scripts and delivering UAT against agreed Test Scripts. Ability to manage release including bug identification management and fix verification process. Proven experience in transitioning support to an orgnaisations existing development and operations resources. Experience in projects having required deployment to an oranisations existing development infrastructure. Proven track record in creation of handover documentation and developer documentation. Nice to Haves The relevant experienced has been gained by working with other large Councils. Experience in the development of financial or case assessment related applications. Familiar with the government design system and GDS Service Manual. Experience in delivery of services to public sector organisations. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 6 Proposal Criteria Approach: Agile and collobrative approach. Approach should be in line with GDS Service Manual for Agile Delivery https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/agile-tools-techniques. Method: Use of recognised agile methodologies in the delivery of including, but not limited to: Scrum, DSDM or Lean. Timescale: Ability to mobilse and deliver product incrementally over in a 6-8 month timescale. Team: Multi-Discplinary team consisting of management and developer resources. Ability to work with existing team established by the Council. Delivery Plan: Ability to curate both project and agile development deliveries plan from requirements gathered. Cultural Fit Criteria Work collaboratively and open in approach and opinions. Be willing to share knowledge, intelligence and insights in an open and transparent way. Be able to work alongside an established team and able to establish positive working relationships. Be able to work remotely from the team whilst maintaining strong relationships. Be willing to provide challenge and offer alternatives in a constructive manner. Have a structured approach to planning and sharing knowledge. Payment Approach Fixed price Assessment Method Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 60% Cultural fit 10% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers No questions have been answered yet Budget range the council's has budgeted in the region of £120k to deliver this project, however, we are open to be guided by the market on this.