Home Office Data Services and Analytics (DSA)
DSA Application & Cloud Products Run Services
6 Incomplete applications
3 SME, 3 large
9 Completed applications
5 SME, 4 large
Important dates
- Published
- Monday 6 July 2020
- Deadline for asking questions
- Monday 13 July 2020 at 11:59pm GMT
- Closing date for applications
- Monday 20 July 2020 at 11:59pm GMT
Overview
- Summary of the work
- Work is required to provide a 2nd and 3rd Line Application & Cloud Products Services team to Data Services and Analytics (DSA) ensuring the provision of tooling to support CI/CD, Database Administration, Automation and the implementation and deployment of components reliably and repeatedly.
- Latest start date
- Thursday 1 October 2020
- Expected contract length
- 24 months
- Location
- London
- Organisation the work is for
- Home Office Data Services and Analytics (DSA)
- 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.
About the work
- 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 the users are and what they need to do
-
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
- Any work that’s already been 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 setup
- Address where the work will take place
-
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 arrangements
-
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 information
- Additional terms and conditions
-
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 and experience
Buyers will use the essential and nice-to-have skills and experience to help them evaluate suppliers’ technical competence.
- Essential skills and 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-have skills and experience
-
- 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
How suppliers will be evaluated
All suppliers will be asked to provide a written proposal.
- How many 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
- Additional assessment methods
-
- Work history
- Presentation
- Evaluation weighting
-
Technical competence
55%Cultural fit
5%Price
40%
Questions asked by suppliers
- 1. How many people are you seeking to hire here and which roles, please?
- The Home Office will be releasing further information at the Request for Proposal stage regarding the requirements, and supplier will be asked to propose a team to fulfil said requirements.
- 2. Can the Authority confirm the expected budget covering the 24 month period?
- The budget for the contract will be dependent upon the result of the Request for Proposal stage, the rates and teams proposed to fulfil the requirements.
- 3. Can the Authority please provide a profile of the expected resources required to provide 24 x 7 support at Level 2 and Level 3?
- The Home Office will be releasing further information at the Request for Proposal stage regarding the requirements, and supplier will be asked to propose a team to fulfil said requirements.
- 4. Given that the Home Office want to access the best responses from across all suppliers, rather than just existing UK Border Force suppliers, can they offer guidance for how a new supplier to UK Borders can achieve maximum points for the question asking for, "Demonstrable knowledge of UK Border Force and commercial carrier sector for Air, Rail and Maritime"?
- Bidders can demonstrate industry or sector knowledge that can be gained and demonstrated through various publicly available sources, or similarly complex environments.
- 5. Given that the Home Office want to access the best responses from across all suppliers, rather than just existing government suppliers, can they offer guidance for how a new supplier to UK Borders can achieve maximum points for the question asking for, "Demonstrable experience building products and services that have passed the Government Digital Service (GDS) standard assessments"
- Government Digital Service Standards are publicly available. Bidders can demonstrate experience building products and services that have passed the Government Digital Service (GDS) standard assessments or equivalent.
- 6. Are the Home Office looking for a single case studies to cover all the technologies mentioned within each question?
- Case studies can be used to fully demonstrate your expertise & experience. If a single case study cannot demonstrate all the technologies then more than one can be described and marking will depend on the strength of those used together.
- 7. Are the Home Office looking for the case studies to demonstrate best practice for using the technologies mentioned in each question?
- The Home Office is always looking to promote best practice but also how solutions are delivered where best practice is not possible, stating a reason.
- 8. Should the case studies lean more towards, support, development or implementation of the tools?
- Run Services are about giving customers consistent & reliable services. I would suggest case studies that describe both the benefits to the customer as well as delivering improved services and value for money are most important.
- 9. In case of similar technologies (i.e. DynamoDB, InfluxDB, Neo4J, MongoDB are examples of NoSQL Database), is it sufficient to demonstrate case study of implementation/development/support of only one of types of NoSQL database?
- These technologies are all used today and we need to ensure there is demonstrable proof of being able to support all these technologies.
-
10. Dear Commercial Manager,
I would like to ask some questions to help understand the business requirements in more detail.
1- What part of the Business is this project for
2- Has the business case been approved
3- Who is the project SRO and senior business manager - The Home Office business area is the Data Service Analytics with appropriate consent to proceed with project. Further details will be provided at the RFP stage.