Managing NHS Collaboration Platform into Public Beta

Tender description

Summary of the work NHS England require a scrum development team to progress the new NHS Collaboration Platform from private to public beta. This requires meeting NHS Service Standards, passing the beta Service Standard Assessment, completing required steps to roll the service out to identified users, maintaining and improving the product in public beta. Expected Contract Length 1 year Latest start date Wednesday 1 June 2022 Budget Range £600,000 Why the Work is Being Done The FutureNHS platform is a key service in supporting the health and care community achieve a “revitalised culture of support and collaboration” to support the delivery of the long-term plan. NHS England recently launched a new open source FutureNHS platform to private beta to help improve the ways communities in the health and care sector connect, share and learn. The goal of this work is to improve the take up of the service across the health and care sector and enable more learning to be shared and consumed by the platform’s users. Problem to Be Solved During Discover and Alpha we identified that the process of sharing information, such as policies and latest guidance, in a secure and trusted way across organisations can be very difficult for National and Regional Leaders. This means that the Health and Social Care staff tends to work in silos, duplicate effort, and use multiple products to share information to different people. From this we identified an opportunity to make sharing information with the right audiences across organisations safe and easy, and thus improve the quality of policies. We are looking to work with a supplier who will improve the service and demonstrate that it can run it at scale. The team will work with the NHS England product team to undertake the beta assessment and move the service into ‘public beta’ with a view to replacing legacy services. Who Are the Users Users of the platform include staff across the health and social care community in England engaged in a wide range of transformation projects. The users working on these projects can vary in terms of seniority and experience, as well as the type of organisations to which they belong. They need to be able to connect, collaborate and share with other users across organisational boundaries and silos. Work Already Done Discovery and Alpha work has been completed with the team successfully passing the Alpha assessment in January. Since the assessment the team has released a private beta to a limited number of users who they are currently gathering feedback from. Existing Team The FutureNHS service is currently run by the Strategy & Development team within the Office of Chief Data & Analytics. For this project the chosen supplier will be expecting to work with the FutureNHS product manager and UX team. Current Phase Beta Skills & Experience • Evidence of designing services compliant with the NHS Service Standard, including using the NHS Service Design Manual, Technology Code of Practice, GOV.UK service manual and undertaking and passing service assessments. • Experience of developing and maintaining web applications using REACT .NET, Umbraco and Azure DevOps Pipeline and GitHub. • Experience using modern standards to deploy robust cloud-based web solutions that can scale to meet the demand of user needs. • Experience of building secure systems and adhering to modern security best practice and standards. • Evidence of in-depth understanding and experience of presenting clear, compelling, evidence-based recommendations for change based on primary and secondary research. Nice to Haves Experience of developing and maintaining open-source products Work Location Remote. The existing team has offices in London and Leeds. Working Arrangments We expect the supplier will conduct most of the work remotely and will be able to provide the facilities for remote working with the existing team. There may be a requirement for travel to London or Leeds for the occasional meetings or workshops if required. We are looking to work according to the Agile principles as documented in the Government & NHS Digital service manuals. We will expect the chosen supplier to perform and provide evidence of such practices in operation. Additional T&Cs 1. Statements of work will be defined for the introduction into public beta and continuous improvement thereafter. 2. All outputs will be owned by NHS England & NHS Improvement and published openly where appropriate using a suitable open license that supports reuse (e.g. MIT and OGL). 3. All materials/outputs derived from the contract shall be the property of NHS England & NHS Improvement. 4. GDPR requirements will be discussed and agreed once the successful supplier has been notified (as part of discussions to agree the wording of the call-off contract). No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Team structure you would propose to deliver this work including skills, experience, responsibilities in this approach and relevance of individuals, and how you will ensure the team deliver • Detail your proposed approach and methodology and how it will successfully deliver working software to meet user needs and ensure maximum value is delivered throughout the product lifecycle. • Demonstrate how you will deliver value for money throughout this project, across both Private and Public Beta phases. • Demonstrate how you would document your work to ensure effective hand over to the business at the end of the contracted period. • Evidence of the delivery of a similar projects including how you identified and measured success criteria. Cultural Fit Criteria • Work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers • Be transparent and collaborative when making decisions • Share your work frequently, openly, honestly and constructively challenging preconceptions • Challenge the status quo • Deliver a proposal that offers Social Value Payment Approach Capped time and materials Assessment Method • Case study • Reference Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 55% Cultural fit 15% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers 1. Please can we enquire about who completed the Discovery and Alpha phases. Discovery was completed by Red Badger, CDS Digital completed the Alpha phase 2. Do you expect to use a standard contract framework for this work? The form of contract will be the DOS Call Off Terms 3. Have you been working with external supplier/s to get to this point? Yes, see response to question around Discovery and Alpha Phases 4. Are offshore or nearshore resources acceptable? No 5. What are your expected timescales from submission of interest, through to proposal and acceptance stage? The proposal stage will be 10th - 19th May and we anticipate announcing the outcome week commencing 30th May 6. What are the job roles of the evaluation panel? Head of FutureNHS, Product Manager, UX Researcher & Designer 7. With regards to the first question, do you require an example of where the supplier has designed, or built and developed a service using the NHS service manual? Yes 8. With regards to Q1 please clarify whether we need to demonstrate one example of having followed all of the standards listed within a single project OR whether we can use a range of examples having used each of the standards Our preference is for one example but will consider a range covering the standards