Proc 713: EBSA Evolution and Business Services

Tender description

Summary of the work Delivering capability to build, run and monitor applications used to transact with the Home Office; strong architecture; engineering leadership capability; accountability for platform design; infrastructure integration; driving ongoing tooling/ process innovation, continuously exploring industry improvements; making operational efficiencies and reduce costs; secure network boundary controls; integration with 3rd parties. Expected Contract Length 2 years + 6 months Latest start date Monday 23 May 2022 Budget Range The maximum budget for the initial term of the contract is capped at £37 million GBP. For the extension period the maximum budget available is £9.25 Million GBP . Total including all extension options is: £46.25 million GBP. Why the Work is Being Done The Environment Build Support and Administration platform (EBSA) is a Home Office AWS cloud secure and scalable environment. It provides hosting for existing and newly approved Home Office applications, to quickly deliver business value to our Citizens and Business teams. Delivering ‘evolution, business delivery, support cloud tooling platforms’ providing: strong architecture; engineering leadership capability; accountability for platform design; infrastructure integration of all services using tooling platforms; gaining approval of new tooling platforms through HO TDA; driving ongoing tooling/ process innovation, continuously exploring industry improvements. making operational efficiencies and reduce costs. To date, there are circa 4000 users on the platform. These are the anticipated roles, but not limited to: DevOps Engineer Infrastructure Engineer Infrastructure Architect Delivery Manager/Scrum Master Tech writers Technical Business Analysis User researchers Product Owners/Managers Problem to Be Solved The EBSA platform was first established in 2015, continuing to deliver capability for Home Office applications. This exercise seeks to identify the appropriate partner organisation to own and deliver the next phase of the EBSA mode of operation to enterprise platform. • Deliver strategic platform initiatives to enable enterprise cloud platform • Continued support of EBSA Platform services, including and not limited to monitoring, logging, security, collaborative tooling, IAM, account vending • Onboarding of new services and support for new demand from existing tenants • Technical Design authority, driving ongoing tooling, process innovation, continuous industry improvements, making operational efficiencies and reduce costs Who Are the Users The EBSA platforms services a number of different users types: • Indirect end users transacting with the Home Office on a daily basis for Immigration, Passports, Citizenship to securely execute use cases in a high availability environment • Direct end users, who make use of the tools owned by the EBSA team and require a complete suite of tools which allow them to develop, test, deploy, maintain, and monitor their applications in a secure, self-service, scalable way. Users are across the Digital Data Technology (DDaT) programme, including Border Force, HM Passport Office, Immigration Enforcement and UK Visas and Immigration. Work Already Done EBSA is a standing self-service cloud platform, initially setup to support one Home Office department. The Platform evolved, with leading industry technologies, to meet the changing needs of the department and hosts the vast majority of HO applications, and tens of thousands of users. Platform evolution is ongoing to maximise efficiency and minimise costs, including onboarding of new tenants and 3rd Party integrations. We have a number of initiatives underway to deliver our technical roadmap, this roadmap will continue to grow during the transition period. The successful supplier will be responsible for owning, delivering and developing this when onboarded. Existing Team The existing team is based on a Platforms model, adopting a broad range of technology roles. The future team is expected to continue to enhance and optimise team capabilities and reduce lead time to fulfil requests, build in quality and make work visible. Our current team size is approx. 80 people, consisting of Management, Product, Site Reliability, Service Delivery; Delivery Managers and 24x7 on call team. Environment is multi-disciplinary/multi vendor; contracted supplier will develop strong collaborative working relationships with existing HO DDaT portfolio and supplier teams to deliver quality services. Current Phase Not applicable Skills & Experience • Evidence resources have existing SC clearances and the ability to rapidly onboard resources from contract start date • Evidence of a robust transition plan, how the plan will be managed to successful completion, assuring continuity of service when the incubment exits. Please include expected benefits during this period. • Demonstrable evidence of capability to rapidly stand up high functioning DevOps teams, ~80 FTEs , and scale team sizes up and down at short notice with the following skills: • Terraform, Kubernetes, Dynatrace, Vault, ELK, Confleunce, JIRA, Bitbucket, Jenkins, RedHatSSO, Prometheus, plus broad range of AWS services • Explain your approach to drive innovation, CI and modern engineering approaches to deliver technical products and services. Detail how you successfully balanced technical debt whilst maintaining high engineering quality standards? • Demonstrate ability to support continuous project delivery, deploying services onto centrally managed cloud tooling platform, day to day support, understanding of application architecture, and managing cross team and programme dependencies • Demonstrate recent experience leading on the latest cloud networking standards, utilising new technologies such as AWS Transit Gateways, WAF's, VPN's and proxies • Demonstrate recent experience of producing an Enterprise Cloud scaleable and securely segregated model. Such as Account Vending, Landing Zones and Control Tower • Please provide evidence of how you have successfully used detailed metrics to demonstrate actual progress in reporting cycles. Outline how you intend to do so for the EBSA platform. • Demonstrate your workpackage approach to ensure our requirements are clearly captured and delivery is assured to quality, time and budgetary tolerances. Please include evidence of how you satisfy legislative requirements. • Demonstrate how you ensure your teams remain on track to deliver, strive for success beyond what is required, maintain clear communication and visibility of deliverables and escalate when appropriate • Demonstrable evidence of the 24 x 7 out of hours support model, including resourcing, problem resolution, escalation, root cause analysis, lessons learnt and inter dependent supplier handoffs and management. • Demonstrate how you drive lean methodologies in the delivery of 'DevOps as a Service', optimising efficiency and the removal of unecessary overheads, including mature cost optimisation techniques on public cloud • Demonstrate ability providing L3 operational cloud tooling platform support, including: incident, change and problem management; application, infrastructure and security management; running operational procedures. • Provide evidence of continuously improving the above operational processes and how you collaborate with L1 and L2 teams in your feedback, see bullet above • Demonstrate recent experience of AGILE Delivery Managers, Product Managers and, teams to deliver products and services, maintain delivery momentum, planning, programme and project dependency, collaboration, reporting and consistent communication loops • Demonstrable recent experience deploying DevOps /SRE practices at scale to manage and evolve live services in a highly dynamic environment, demonstrating successful adoption of new tooling, process and procedures • Demonstrable evidence of recent experience leading, creating and maintaining platform vision and translating this to delivery roadmaps in line with changing organisational demand. • Demonstrate proactive account leadership, financial governance, willingness and adapting to dynamic needs, decision making and a data driven methods of measuring success, include account management support roles, processes and tools. • Demonstrate how you will utilise your broader industry knowledge to provided added value. For example bringing in industry best practice and partners to contribute to the delivery and solutions. Nice to Haves • Demonstrate 3+ years recent practical experience of change management to achieve direct user engagement and adoption of new platform tools, procedures and processes • Demonstrate proactive account leadership to deliver the level of support and resources required to foster knowledge transfer and on track, quality deliverables in a multi-vendor, multi-disciplinary approach and environment Work Location The majority of the services are expected to be based at our London and Croydon sites. However, the successful supplier must be capable of providing the service nationwide. However, due to the current government guidelines the supplier will be asked to work remotely and when required work on site. It is envisaged that suppliers will be required to attend office locations at least 40% of the working week. The work will be divided into Statements of Work (SOWs) which will clearly identify the relevant base location. Working Arrangments The service will be required to work to standards and practices set by Government Digital Service and Home Office Teams. Resources are expected to work as part of existing delivery teams focused on specific outcomes, a mixture of civil servants and contractors across the Platform. The work will be divided into Statements of Work (SoWs) which will clearly identify the relevant primary location. Expenses will not form part of the cost unless the supplier is asked to work from a secondary location instead during the execution of the work relating to the SoW. Security Clearance Provider personnel (and sub-contractors) must comply with Home Office security standards. SC clearance is required for all personnel as a minimum and in some instances, NPPV3 clearance. The cost of clearance is met by the Supplier. Additional T&Cs The work will be subject to the terms of the DOS 5 framework, Call Off Contact and conducted under individual SoW's, subjected to either Fixed priced, T&M or Capped T&M, as required. 1.Travel expenses are payable for journeys outside the specified SoW base locations, with prior customer approval, in line with HO Travel policy (subsistence is not payable). 2. Professions rate caps will be applied to all standard roles at all SFIA levels. 3. Seasonal furloughs may be required. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria • Onboarding and transition • Technology • Organisation • Work packages • Out of Hours Approach • Account Leadership • Innovation • Essential Skills and Experience • Approach and Methodology • Live Service Support and Service Improvement • Added Value / Value for Money Cultural Fit Criteria Social Value Payment Approach Fixed price Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 70% Cultural fit 10% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. Who from your team will be scoring applications for this opportunity and what positions do they hold? Information regarding the evaluation panel is confidential. 2. Who is the incumbent and how long they have been the incumbent? CAPGEMINI UK PLC 3. Can you please provide an anticipated timeline for this procurement that includes dates for: 1) Shortlisting Notification for Stage 2 2) Submission Deadline for Stage 23) Presentation 4) Evaluation period 5) Award Notification The Indicative timelines are:1) Stage 1: Shortlisting – notifications to bidders 13/04/222) Shortlisting Notification for Stage 2 13/04/20223) Submission Deadline for Stage 205/05/20224) Stage 2: Presentation 16/05/2022-17/05/20225) Stage 2: Evaluation period 06/05/2022 – 18/05/20226) Award NotificationW/C 30/05/2022 4. Can you confirm if shortlisted suppliers will have the opportunity to present? Yes – the requirements for which will be highlighted in the Stage 2 documentation 5. Has any external supplier been involved in the initial scoping work? If so, who? No 6. Please note bullets 3 and 4 in section Essential skills and experience, see belowDemonstrable evidence of capability to rapidly stand up high functioning DevOps teams, ~80 FTEs , and scale team sizes up and down at short notice with the following skills:Terraform, Kubernetes, Dynatrace, Vault, ELK, Confleunce, JIRA, Bitbucket, Jenkins, RedHatSSO, Prometheus, plus broad range of AWS services are 1 question 7. What is the payment approach, is it fixed only? The payment approach is Time and Materials, Capped Time and Materials, and Fixed Price. 8. Regarding Q2, please can you confirm that you are looking for evidence of where we have created and used a robust transition plan? Yes 9. Please could you confirm whether this is one question or two separate questions: “Explain your approach to drive innovation, CI and modern engineering approaches to deliver technical products and services. Detail how you successfully balanced technical debt whilst maintaining high engineering quality standards?” This is one question 10. Please can you confirm if question 16 should read as: “Demonstrate recent experience of providing agile Delivery Managers, Product Managers, and teams to deliver products and services…”? YesOriginal question ‘Demonstrate recent experience of AGILE Delivery Managers, Product Managers and, teams to deliver products and services, maintain delivery momentum, planning, programme and project dependency, collaboration, reporting and consistent communication loops’ Should be ‘Demonstrate recent experience of providing agile Delivery Managers, Product Managers, and teams to deliver products and service, maintain delivery momentum, planning, programme and project dependency, collaboration, reporting and consistent communication loops’ 11. Please could you confirm if we can use multiple examples in a single question? Yes 12. Please can you confirm if you have a timeframe in mind for ‘recent experience’, i.e. within three years? Yes – within three years is acceptable. 13. For Q2, please can you confirm if ‘expected benefits during this period’ refers to those expected during the transition from the incumbent on EBSA? If so, please can you clarify how long you expect this transition period to be? Yes, this refers to benefits during the transition period. We’re expecting the transition to be between 4-12 weeks. 14. Please can you clarify if the requirement to be on site for 40% of the time applies to all resources or only to some of the team (i.e. the core team)? This will be determined during each SOW, though it is envisaged that the core team will be onsite for a minimum 40% of the time. 15. Please can you clarify if everyone needs to be SC-cleared from the date they start working or can suppliers ramp up? Any supplier resource will be required to be SC cleared prior to starting work. 16. For Q2, does “how the plan will be managed to successful completion, assuring continuity of service when the incumbent exits” refer to how we managed the transition plan in the example we provide as evidence, or does it refer to how we will manage the transition plan to successful completion on EBSA? This refers to how ‘you’ managed the transition plan in the evidence you provide. 17. Please could you confirm what is meant by ‘CI’ in Q5? Continuous improvements 18. Please can you confirm until when the incumbent is expected to support transition and when their contract ends? The incumbent will support transition. The contract is expected to end after the transition period of an estimated 4-12 weeks from the start of this contract. 19. 20. Please can you clarify how you envision splitting the BAU support and evolution teams (e.g. 40% BAU, 60% Evolution)? This will vary over the life of the contract depending on the level of automation and self-service capabilities that are developed. 20. What is the expected team size needed on Day 1? We believe 80 FTE is the team size after ramp up, are we correct ? This will be determined during the transition to the new supplier. 21. Please can you clarify for Q15 if ‘feedback’ refers to our answer for Q14? If this is the case, should we use the same example in both questions so that our answer to Q15 demonstrates how we collaborated with the teams we referenced in Q14? Yes 22. 23. For Q20 in the Nice to Have section, “Demonstrate how you will utilise your broader industry knowledge to provide added value. For example bringing in industry best practice and partners to contribute to the delivery and solutions”, please can you clarify if you are looking for a DOS standard experience-led response referencing previous work completed, or a response which outlines our proposed approach to this work? A response which outlines your proposed approach to utilising industry knowledge in this work. 23. In Q10, the part which asks suppliers to ‘Please include evidence of how you satisfy legislative requirements’ differs from the rest of the question which we understand to be about capturing and adhering to requirements. Please can you confirm if we are correct in assuming Q10 is asking about our ability to capture and comply with requirements, whether they be legislative, timeline, commercial, technical, etc? We work within a dynamically changing political landscape and we, at short notice, required to make changes to meet legislative requirements which may impact work in progress. 24. Please can you confirm if the consolidated question comprised of Q3 and Q4 (“Demonstrable evidence of capability to rapidly stand up high functioning DevOps teams, ~80 FTEs, and scale team sizes up and down at short notice with the following skills: Terraform, Kubernetes, Dynatrace, Vault, ELK, Confluence, JIRA, Bitbucket, Jenkins, RedHatSSO, Prometheus, plus broad range of AWS services”) is to be answered in 100 words or over two 100 words text boxes (for a total 200 words)? You may use both text boxes to provide your response. 25. 1. In your RFI document you state the following:“Off-payroll (IR35) determination, Supply of resource: the off-payroll rules will apply to any workers engaged through a qualifying intermediary, such as their own limited company”.• Our interpretation is that IR35 needs to be a consideration as the contractor is operating through their limited company. i.e. they will need an IR35 determination. Will the HO carry out such determinations?• Additionally, our understanding is that such determination shall not apply if the Supplier is to provide Services, as the Supplier will be the End User of such Services? IR35 determinations will be provided in all instances.