DSA Application & Cloud Products Run Services

Tender description

Why the Work is Being Done Data Services and Analytics (DSA) is currently undergoing a transformation. Over the life of the contract the expectation is to develop a single DSA Application & Cloud Products Run Services team to support both the convergence of individual teams and encompass contracts for DSA current and future products, solutions and services developed over the next 2-3 years. A key objective of this transformation programme, is to have completed the transition of all on-premise DSA products and services into the cloud by September 2021. Problem to Be Solved DSA products and services are moving to enterprise class delivery capabilities and some will require 24/7/365 support. DSA currently has multiple support teams and contracts that need to be enhanced and consolidated to deliver the high level of service required for enterprise class operations. Who Are the Users The users are either: Product Managers & teams within DSA who build data driven products and services to provide analysis, insight, reporting for their customers, to support business operations, policy making and decision making. OR Users of DSA Products elsewhere in the Home Office and across Government. Early Market Engagement N/A Work Already Done Some DSA products and services are currently operated as enterprise class. Existing Team The existing teams are comprised of a mixture of supplier lead services - managed support services, DevOps and DBAs specialists. These resources report into Home Office permanent civil servants. The landscape is a mixture of civil servants providing some 1st line product support, post-graduate DevOps resources and other suppliers provide Infrastructure, Data Engineering, Data Matching Engineering and Product Developers, as well as other DSA civil service departments. Current Phase Not applicable Work Location The services will be carried out from Home Office locations primarily Croydon and Bedfont Lakes with occasional work at other Home Office and Supplier sites. During the COVID-19 lockdown staff are required to work from home or in a safe environment and to attend meetings using digital channels in accordance with current Home Office policy. Working Arrangments The new supplier will be required to report to the Head of Application Services / DSA Application & Cloud Products Run Services (or delegated representative). The Supplier must be flexible and work with mixed teams across multiple sites effectively. We expect resources to be onsite 5 days a week. The team will work from the principal locations with working hours as required, initially 8 hours Mon-Fri 08:30-1730 or as agreed, with options to extend hours up to 24/7, with some occasional out of hours support. Travel outside of the M25/Greater London area will be subject to Home Office Travel Policy. Security Clearance All staff must have Home Office SC level security clearance prior to starting work. Staff not in current possession of SC security clearance must be willing to undergo SC security clearance. Additional T&Cs 1. The Home Office will use the standard DOS 4 contract 2.Travel expenses are payable for journeys outside the M25 (for Greater London based SOWs) or for journeys greater than 10 miles of other SOW base locations, where approved in advance by the customer and in line with HO Travel policy. 3. Professions rate caps will apply to all standard roles at all SFIA levels. SFIA 1, 2, 6 and 7 levels are not required. 4. Seasonal furloughs may be required. 5. Maximum sub-contractor margin caps applies. 6. Individual SOWs may be required at fixed price, T&M or capped T&M Skills & Experience Experience of hands-on knowledge and accredited to UK Government OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE: delivering all of the following essential skills working in a multi-supplier customer environment within the last 12 months. Experience of providing DevOps and application support of multiple secure enterprise-scale critical consuming products and services in complex, hybrid on-premise and cloud environments with 24/7 service hours. Experience of delivering continuous delivery, cloud services improvement on AWS, Azure or other Public Cloud offerings with Infrastructure-as-Code; application CI/CD build pipelines; containerisation platforms; development tooling; security management tooling. Supporting centralised DSA function with strict security controls, critical real-time carrier and external data feeds. Experience of open source and commercial software, including ActiveEon, SASDI, Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau 2018/2020. Supporting resilient distributed data processing systems covering streaming, micro-batch, bulk processing architectures, including Domain Driven Design, Event Sourcing, Command Query Response Segmentation (CQRS), including Kafka Streams, RabbitMQ, SQS, SNS. Experience of implementing/using mature logging, monitoring, alerting and real time dashboard solutions enabling swift, one-time only resolution of complex issues, including Nagios, Sysdig, Jaeger, Prometheus, ELK Stack, Grafana. Experience of building/supporting RDS databases including Oracle and PostgreSQL, MPP databases including Greenplum and Redshift, In-Memory Caching technologies including Redis, and NoSQL databases including DynamoDB, InfluxDB, Neo4J, MongoDB. Experience of how AWS, Azure and other Public Cloud services are integrated and secured in an operational data processing platform and the underlying technologies, including extensive experience of server-less technologies. Experience in Agile DevOps services, optimising efficiency/ removal of unnecessary overheads, including mature cost monitoring, optimisation techniques on public cloud, supporting migration and transition services to Cloud environments. Experience of building and supporting applications in Python (including Django and PySpark), Java (including Spring Boot), JavaScript (including Node.js), and command-line scripting languages including Bash and PowerShell. Nice to Haves Demonstrable knowledge of UK Border Force and commercial carrier sector for Air, Rail and Maritime Demonstrable experience building products and services that have passed the Government Digital Service (GDS) standard assessments Demonstrable experience designing, deploying and supporting Shared Services and Atlassian products including Jira software and Jira Service Desk, Microsoft SharePoint, Slack and RocketChat Demonstrable experience in Source Code, Artefact Binary Management and Test Automation tooling including GitHub, GitLab, Artifactory and Quay.io, SonarQube, DBFit, Fitnesse and Cucumber No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 4 Proposal Criteria Technical skill and ability Mobilisation approach Proposed team/structure and CVs Value for money and commercial flexibility Cultural Fit Criteria The supplier must have a track record of successful delivery in complex Public Sector organisations with proven ability to work transparently, collaboratively, and effectively in a multi-supplier environment. The supplier team must have a track record of problem solving, driving ongoing tooling/process innovation, exploring industry improvements; and making operational efficiencies. The supplier must have the proven ability to provide and manage an ongoing knowledge-transfer process, and share existing best practice The supplier must maintain a no-blame culture and encourage people to learn from their mistakes The supplier must have excellent communication skills with client stakeholders and staff at all levels, showing willingness to take responsibility for their work Payment Approach Capped time and materials Assessment Method Work history Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 55% Cultural fit 5% Price 40% Questions from Suppliers No questions have been answered yet Budget range rate caps for the service charges will be applied based on home office bench marked rates for technical resources at sfia levels range 3 to 5, further guidance will be provided at rfp stage. range for rates is £465 - £810.