DDaT21189 Public beta of www.innovateukedge.ukri.org

Tender description

Summary of the work Maintain a service aimed at innovative small businesses looking to grow. The service helps users find exploit innovation, source funding and enter new markets. We need office hours cover support to continue to iterate the service. Expected Contract Length 1 year with the option to extend for up to an additional 3 months Latest start date Monday 4 October 2021 Budget Range The budget for the initial 12 month period should not exceed £100,000.00 excluding VAT. The budget for the optional 3 month extension (if invoked) will not exceed £20,000.00 excluding VAT Why the Work is Being Done Innovate UK EDGE is an initiative to help innovative businesses to grow. Innovate UK EDGE is a bespoke digital and face-to-face service where Innovate UK lead 400 advisers who help clients exploit their innovation, source funding and enter new markets. The service has passed its beta assessment, but requires more time in public beta, building on work done to date. Problem to Be Solved Proportionate to the (modest) size of the service, we’ll build on the deep empathy attained so far, we’ll do ux / dev iterations, rounds of usability testing then releases onto production. We will revisit the site’s ability to meet AA accessibility compliance and also keep abreast of ongoing SEO changes (Google’s Core Web Vitals) and content formats. We also need a 9-5, Monday-Friday SLA, to be on hand for any critical support issues which needs attention. Who Are the Users As a growing business, We need to re-evaluate our structure and processes, so the business is more strategic, structured for long-term success and avoid common pitfalls along the way. As a growing business, I need to identify funding sources and assistance with my broader pitch, so I can create the strongest applications without it taking my attention away from running the business As a growing business, I need a partner with specific international market experience who can help us to structure our offer and connections to help us deliver, so we can continue to achieve our ambitions Early Market Engagement N/A Work Already Done Discovery,Alpha,BETA phases are complete. Interviewing/ux testing with 150 participants and surveying 2000 respondents provided us with a robust user-segmentation and-website:https://innovateukedge.ukri.org/ The technology-architecture has two EC2s in an auto-scaling group behind a single-load balancer:Drupal Presentation layer/Zend Service layer.Persistent-storage handled by RDS-relational database service (MySQL). S3-storage buckets for static assets.Elasticache within application website routed through CloudFrontCDN.CloudWatch monitors service's health.AMI stores server images.Resources for each stack live inside VPC and series of subnets isolating them from rest of the AWS cloud via series of virtual firewalls at different levels.Service layer application consumes/makes requests to a Salesforce as well as GovDelivery and EC APIs. Existing Team The in house team consists of the following: - x1 Service Manager. - Arms length involvement from UKRI’s Web Ops, Security and Governance teams The supplier might subcontract accessibility audits and usability lab space to third parties Current Phase Beta Skills & Experience • Demonstrate your experience with UX and user testing (6.5% weighting) • Detail your teams experience with elastic search (6.5% weighting) • Detail your teams experience of implementing 3rd party APIs (9.75% weighting) • Detail your teams experience with the latest version of Drupal (6.5% weighting) • Demonstrable experience of technical SEO enhancement and keeping pace with the industry (6.5% weighting) Nice to Haves • Experience participating in a Government Digital Service service assessment (6.5% weighting) • Experience identifying and mitigating risk to digital service (3.25%weighting) Work Location Initially remotely during the impact of COVID-19 then Polaris House, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN2 1FL. There is no need for the supplier to commute to the office Working Arrangments The service team must be based together (no traveling to site at the budget holder's expense). Security Clearance Baseline Personnel Security Standard Additional T&Cs No additional conditions No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria • Demonstrate how your proposed team’s technical expertise will ensure the successful delivery of this project. (5% weighting) • Demonstrate how your Technical solution, approach / methodology meets our user needs. (5% weighting) • Provide details on identified risks and dependencies and a plan for mitigation (5% weighting) • Provide details of suggested size, shape/make up of the proposed team,demonstrating how this team structure will maintain the ability to deliver services. Proposed Team structure (2% weighting) • Provide details of your contingency plan for sickness/absence within the team (2.5% weighting) Cultural Fit Criteria • Demonstrate your teams ability to deliver in an open, collaborative, agile way according to the principles outlined in the Government Service Design Manual. (5% weighting) • How the supplier solves problems (5% weighting) • The supplier’s attitude to making mistakes (5% weighting) Payment Approach Time and materials Assessment Method Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 65% Cultural fit 15% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. 1. Procurement timeframe The anticipated procurement timeframes are as follows:9th September 2021 – Notification of shortlisting outcome16th September 2021 – Written proposal deadlineW/C 20th September 2021 – Presentations30th September 2021 – Notification of award outcome 2. 2. Scoring The requirement will be scored on the 0-3 DOS scoring methodology:-0 Not met or no evidence1 Partially met2 Met3 Exceeded 3. Can resources work from outside UK (Offshore)? We expect the contract to be managed and run from the UK, but a limited amount of offshore resource can be used in support of this if duly justified in the tender response 4. Do you have a bank of usability testing subject we are able to leverage? Or would a new test panel be required? We would expect a new panel to be recruited 5. Can you confirm if this is a condensed piece of work to run over an initial period, or if it is required to be delivered over the initial 12 months. Also, can you confirm if, Covid aside, there is a requirement for supplier staff to work on customer site, and if this is to be regular or infrequent? There is no requirement to work on customer's site, although there will be a requirement to meet regularly for contract management purposes. With regards to the time period 12 months, the initial plan will need to be based on 12 months. However there is a contingency built into the requirement should the project over-run however 12 months is the period that should be worked towards. 6. Are you able to share any findings/reports on the user research already conducted in the previous Discovery, Alpha, BETA phases? Not at this time but further information will be shared if successful to shortlist stage 7. At the next stage will you be looking for suppliers’ approaches to provide a break-down of the available £100,00 budget into tangible deliverables across the 12 month period based on current high-level detail in the “problem to be solved” section, in order to deliver an enhanced beta by the end of this 12-month period? Yes. The budget figure that will need to be based on is £100,000 excluding VAT across the 12 month period.