Westminster City Council and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Build, host and support WCC and RBKC websites on Drupal 8

13 Incomplete applications

8 SME, 5 large

15 Completed applications

15 SME, 0 large

Published: Monday 29 June 2020
Deadline for asking questions: Monday 6 July 2020 at 11:59pm GMT
Closing date for applications: Monday 13 July 2020 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

Summary of the work: Build, host and support two user-centred websites for RBKC and WCC, platformed on separate instances of Drupal 8 and hosted on Azure. Codes, modules and features with flexibility to be shared and deployed, simultaneously and separately, to both instances of Drupal. Migrate the existing content and assets from Drupal 7
Latest start date: Friday 14 August 2020
Expected contract length: 2 years . Expected build and implementation completion 2nd October 2020
Location: London
Organisation the work is for: Westminster City Council and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Budget range: Circa £278,500 for build.

In addition, it is expected that annual support and maintenance costs of all sites will not exceed £75,000.

About the work

Why the work is being done: Both websites need to be re-platformed from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. Online customer experience is inconsistent and lacks uniform standards; online information can be out of date, inaccurate, hard to find, inaccessible; lack of knowledge and understanding of customer behaviour to drive decisions based on data; customers can’t access all the services they need to online; customers find inconsistencies between online and other channel offerings. To manage our digital estate better, reduce the number of CMS and third-party systems we have and utilise as many of Drupal's features as possible so that we do not need to buy in services or platforms from third parties.
Problem to be solved: The new corporate websites will act as the primary customer-facing channels of our customer services programmes, offering convenient access and encouraging self-service. This project will deliver already designed user-centred, mobile responsive and accessible websites, moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.
Provide the ability for WCC/RBKC to access additional website instances for associated sites with unique URLs (microsites and other sites).
The web CMS must be hosted, highly usable, and provide multi-channel support.
Each site must be provided with multiple environments. As a minimum, Development, Test, Staging and production environments. A testing environment should also be available completely outside the new hosting arrangements for testing infrastructure and hosted architecture problems, as well as Deep Penetration Testing so that it doesn't affect our live websites.
Who the users are and what they need to do: Our audience is made up of residents, visitors, councillors, staff, businesses and partners. A full segmentation of audience is available. Some examples of usage are:
Residents use our website for finding their bin collection day or paying fines and licences; councillors look for information on council meetings and minutes; staff use the site to provide customers with information; developers and investors for planning applications; businesses use our website to find events, support and apply for grants and funding as well as apply for licences.
Early market engagement: We have spoken to a number of suppliers and a number of public sector organisations.
Any work that’s already been done: Both councils have broken down their web refresh projects into three phases, two of which are already complete; Discovery, For Alpha, RBKC re-designed their front-end look and feel, UX and UI and IA, and implemented it on their existing Drupal 7 site. WCC engaged in intensive user testing and have come up with new template designs, UX, UI and IA which are technology agnostic. Documentation of all work, including backlogs, will be provided to shortlisted candidates.
Existing team: Content Management team, Web Project Manager, Customer Experience and Digital Programme Manager, Web Business analyst,Digital Communications Officer, UX Lead.
Current phase: Alpha

Work setup

Address where the work will take place: WCC City Hall and RBKC Horton Street (pending re-opening of these offices due to Covid-19 epidemic). Suppliers can work remotely, but if offices re-open during the course of the project they will be expected to attend an initiation meeting, scheduled Sprint Planning meetings and Sprint review meetings and show and tells. Otherwise, all work can be done remotely.
Working arrangements: On-site for kick-off meetings and face-to-face meetings for key tasks, to ensure swift issue resolution, project milestones achievement, and timescales remain on target. Additional onsite meetings as required. Otherwise, off-site conference calls and weekly reports.
Security clearance: BPSS

Additional information

Additional terms and conditions

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: Building and supporting at least two robust, scalable, high availability, Azure-hosted (or otherwise cloud based) websites on Drupal 8.

Building a highly usable and intuitive back office web CMS for content management and publication, which scales to handle large volumes of data, in a variety of content format types.

CMS Security admin and access control, allowing authorised users to perform full operations on all data and objects related to website activities (page creation, navigation, content publication, integration).

Creating additional Web CMS instances for new independent websites using the same platform, having their own identity and styling.

Providing business continuity processes and procedures ensuring minimal service disruption; having effective disaster recovery procedures; with high availability service levels of operational uptime

Testing of website (accessibility and usability), throughout design and development cycle using a range of devices and assistive technology used by their various audiences.

Successfully complying with and following relevant ISO standards and guidelines for cloud services and information security.

Website personalisation allowing users to view relevant content of specific interest.
Nice-to-have skills and experience: Providing functionality within the website (CMS) features to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing with relevant stakeholders, partners and users.

Have context awareness through past user behaviour and choice, to make data driven decisions to help guide the user’s journey and deliver relevant content.

Provide expertise regarding Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) best practices to help increase visitor usage of our corporate website, and SEO techniques.

Have business intelligence and site analytics capabilities (website data, performance monitoring and optimisation, journey analytics, usage and browsing traffic activity)

How suppliers will be evaluated

All suppliers will be asked to provide a written proposal.

How many suppliers to evaluate

Proposal criteria

How the solution meets our essential requirements, showing a clear understanding of our brief.
Technical solution offered with two previous examples of successfully delivering and implementing in a public sector local government organisation of equivalent scale and one example of an e-commerce site.
Approach and methodology, with capacity to successfully deliver within our completion timeframe of October 2020.
Proactively identify risks and dependencies highlighting approaches to managing these with innovative alternatives (that doesn’t add or increase project timelines and/or costs) but adds value and reduces risk.
Value for money
Risks and dependencies

Cultural fit criteria

Work as part of a multidisciplinary team with WCC and RBKC
Take responsibility for delivery of work,and build positive successful relationships by sharing knowledge and experiences.
Be transparent, collaborative, and innovative in terms of problem solving and decision making.

Payment approach

Fixed price

Additional assessment methods

Work history
Presentation

Evaluation weighting

Technical competence

64%

Cultural fit

11%

Price

25%

Questions asked by suppliers

1. Please advise if you wish one example per response as per standard protocols on Digital Marketplace "You should only provide one example for each essential or nice-to-have requirement (unless the buyer specifies otherwise)." or whether you would accept multiple examples: We will accept multiple examples
2. Who is the incumbent and are they able to apply?: This is a new requirement for the bi-borough replatforming.
The current website for hosting and support is Code Enigma, they are able to apply
3. Are you open to have a separate supplier for the support and maintenance part of the project?: Not at the moment, we will prefer the build provider to support and maintain in the interim.
4. Is it a requirement that the successful supplier be ISO27001 certified?: This is a preferred requirement, but not essential
5. Does your stated budget for annual “support and maintenance” include hosting?: No – the site will be hosted within the council’s Azure environment. The budget includes configuration, support and management within this environment
6. Is your timeline for completion of the build and implementation work between 14 August and 2 October fixed or flexible? If flexible, to what extent?: 2nd October is a deadline solely for build. Implementation, testing and further iterations would take place later, with the go live of the sites scheduled for 10th November.
7. Are we correct in understanding that you expect the successful supplier to complete the build and implementation work within a delivery window of approximately 7 weeks (between 14 August and 2 October), and that the budget you have nominally allocated to the work carried out within that window is £278,500?: The 2nd October deadline is solely to complete the build. Implementation, testing and further iterations would take place later, with the go live of the sites scheduled for 10th November. The delivery window has some flexibility, and the budget reflects that there may be a need for considerable resource
8. Is the completion date correct? It appears that this is a six week project with a £278k budget. If it is correct, is it a desired completion date or a hard deadline?: It is a desired completion date for the build. Implementation, testing and further iterations would take place later, with the go live of the sites scheduled for 10th November.
9. Can you please advise the reason for the target completion date of 2nd October 2020 and is there flexibility in this completion date?: It is a desired completion date for the build itself. Implementation, testing and further iterations would take place later, with the go live of the sites scheduled for 10th November.
10. Does the proposed charge for annual support and maintenance include hosting?: No – the site will be hosted within the council’s Azure environment. The budget includes configuration, support and management within this environment
11. In our experience of delivering these projects, and given the scope of this project is to migrate 2 websites, the budget seems quite low. Can you advise if there any flexibility in the budget figure for the implementation project?: The budget has been compared and ratified against similar local authority projects, however there is some scope for flexibility
12. Is your preference to receive multiple examples per question or one example per question? Who are the agency/agencies that conducted the Discovery & design work and will they be pitching for the this project too?: RBKC discovery: EchoSix. Westminster Discovery: Nudge. RBKC Alpha: Big Blue Door. WCC Alpha: Zoocha. These agencies are free to pitch.
13. Are the websites integrated with any 3rd party API or external services?: There is very limited API integration. We will provide a list to shortlisted suppliers.
14. Please can you provide more details on the interactive features of the site? User login? Resident dashboard?: There is a user login and resident dashboard, but these are hosted elsewhere and are not part of the remit of this project. Some simple Drupal forms may need to be re-platformed from D7 to D8.
15. Can you define what type of personalisation experience you are anticipating? Segmented Vs personalised by user data (postcodes etc): Segmented, syndicated content based on browsing history. This only applies to the Westminster site.
16. Will you consider a UK sub-contractor to deliver part of the requirements to ensure you get the very best delivery team?: No, we would prefer to limit the project to one agency.
17. In our experience of delivering these projects, and given the scope of this project is to migrate 2 websites, the budget seems quite low. Can you advise if there any flexibility in the budget figure for the implementation project?: The budget has been compared and ratified against similar local authority projects, however there is some scope for flexibility

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