Awarded to People Source Consulting Ltd

Start date: Thursday 1 October 2020
Value: £360,000
Company size: SME

London Borough of Hackney

Programme Manager, Modern Technology for Housing Services

30 Incomplete applications

30 SME, 0 large

65 Completed applications

61 SME, 4 large

• Published: Tuesday 18 August 2020
• Deadline for asking questions: Tuesday 25 August 2020 at 11:59pm GMT
• Closing date for applications: Tuesday 1 September 2020 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

• Specialist role: Programme manager
• Summary of the work: Hackney is transforming how tenants and leaseholders are supported by building services designed around the people that use them. Our ambitious roadmap of development will enable us to remove dependence on a single legacy system within 18 months, operating and improving a series of products, connected via our API platform.
• Latest start date: Tuesday 1 September 2020
• Expected contract length: 2 years
• Location: No specific location, for example they can work remotely
• Organisation the work is for: London Borough of Hackney

About the work

• Who the specialist will work with: As the Programme Manager you’ll help manage stakeholders and the product teams around the common goal, working with agile delivery managers using disciplined agile methodology. You’ll also be a champion for user needs, simpler business processes, and re-usable technology, helping colleagues use these to deliver better and more efficient services. Successful candidates will have leadership experience of agile product teams.
• What the specialist will work on: 1. Coordinate a multi-disciplinary agile software development team to manage delivery and iteratively improve our housing products, as well as build new user-focused digital services for housing.; 2. Oversee roadmap planning, resource management, procurement, and vendor management. Flag potential risk points early and work with the team and stakeholders to creative solutions to address pitfalls.; 3. Communicate the team’s progress and challenges to key stakeholders, and ensure that team members are kept up to date.; 4. Implement a product vision developed in collaboration with housing leadership.

Work setup

• Address where the work will take place: Hackney, London and remote working
• Working arrangements: Mainly remote working, but with some travel to Hackney in the future for some face to face work.
• Security clearance: n/a

Additional information

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:
  • Familiarity with cloud computing including continuous integration / deployment, test-driven development, automated testing
  • Familiarity with accessibility a passion for inclusive design and comfortable with user-centred approaches
  • Work comfortably in an agile environment with rapidly changing deadlines, workloads, and goals.
  • Create effective, prioritized product descriptions, user stories, and delivery plans to meet user needs in a cost-effective way.
  • Lead data-based continuous delivery and improvement, ensuring that services are regularly analysed, maintained and improved to better user experience.
  • Design service processes to include continuous feedback loops between customers and the service team.
• Nice-to-have skills and experience: Ideally you will have knowledge of social housing and familiarity with the legislation and processes that support good outcomes for tenants, leaseholders and the landlord

How suppliers will be evaluated

All suppliers will be asked to provide a work history.

• How many specialists to evaluate: 3
• Cultural fit criteria:
  • Work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers
  • Work with Hackney and other suppliers in a diverse environment
  • Be transparent and collaborative when making decisions
  • Share knowledge and experience with other team members
  • Have a no-blame culture and encourage people to learn from their mistakes
• Additional assessment methods:
  • Reference
  • Interview
  • Presentation
• Evaluation weighting:

  Technical competence

  60%

  Cultural fit

  7%

  Price

  33%

Questions asked by suppliers

• 1. The closing date for applications is 01/09 and the start date for the role is also 01/09. Is this correct?: The correct latest start date should be 1 October, apologies
• 2. What cloud environment are you using?: AWS
• 3. What is the overall budget?: There is an overall programme budget from which these fees will be paid. Therefore we have some flexibility over the rate/budget for this specialist role
• 4. Is there an incumbent?: No, this is a new role
• 5. What is the maximum day rate?: There is an overall programme budget from which these fees will be paid. Therefore we have some flexibility over the rates
• 6. What is the IR35 status?: Inside IR35
• 7. Can you please review the IR35 status?: The role is outside of IR35 - please ignore the previous answer
• 8. Can resource work from offshore location?: Yes if that was necessary. We would want to discuss how we would make use of technology to collaborate over the period of the contract
• 9. How does this role fit with the wider programme of Hackney's digital transformation initiatives within housing?: This role is primarily focussed on the programme of work that enables us to decommission our existing system, but there will naturally need to be collaboration and coordination with other digital transformation initiatives.
• 10. Do IT lead this programme, or is it lead by a more business-focused team within Hackney?: This programme is led by IT (and this role would be based in IT) - as you would expect there is close working and collaboration with colleagues in relevant service teams.
• 11. Is this a technology-initiated programme? Or is it a business transformation-lead programme?: The programme is technology initiated but plays a key role in achieving business transformation, working closely with service teams and housing transformation.
• 12. How often will someone have to be onsite?: This is harder to answer due to the current Covid situation. We are all working remotely at the moment with some plans to return to the office longer term, but in reduced numbers. So, we think there will be some need to be on site but for now, remote working is the norm, and that is set to continue for the forseeable future.
• 13. What systems are you currently using and what would be moving on too?: Please have a look at https://blogs.hackney.gov.uk/hackit/; where you can find public weeknotes, show and tells and blog posts about our approach and what we have done so far. This should give you a good insight into our progress so far.
• 14. Is there currently a supplier providing services to the programme? such as development, environments, CI pipeline, automation testing etc? if so, are you able to say who that is?: Our internal teams work alongside and with a range of agencies on various projects (all of these are detailed in our public weeknotes and show and tells on blogs.hackney.gov.uk). This includes work on the above.
• 15. Has the authority discussed this work with any supplier prior to this being released?Have any discussions about an appropriate candidate already taken place?: No - we have not carried out any pre-market engagement.
• 16. Are you using DAD – Disciplined Agile Delivery and any further disciplined e.g. 1) disciplined devops, 2)disciplined agile It 3)disciplined agile enterprise?If so, do you need experienced expert in this methodology or all rounder in all Agile variations?: We don't currently use any 'disciplined agile' methodology. We are looking for experience in and confidence in working in an agile culture.
• 17. Are you looking for a single senior person to deliver the role or would you consider a blended team approach that brings senior / strategic leadership and tactical delivery skills together?: We would be open to creative and innovative suggestions on how to deliver this role effectively. Equally we would be open to flexible working arrangements - job sharing/part time, but would be looking for how you would effectively deliver against the criteria.
• 18. Is there an existing architecture function – and has a target architecture already been decided upon? 'Is there a data strategy and architecture in place already?: We have decided on a high level target architecture as follows:; Our high volume applications are built in Ruby on Rails ; Our lower volume applications are built in React; Applications exchange data over REST APIs, developed to the standards in our API Playbook (https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/API-Playbook-v2-beta) ; We adopt a server less approach or containerisation to support our portability between cloud vendors; Data is written to Postgres SQL, using the HACT open data standard as the target schema and favouring other open data schema where possible; Our primary cloud supplier is AWS
• 19. Is this opportunity purely for a Programme Manager role – or is there scope to offer a programme team?: We would be open to applications from a team to fulfil the programme manager role. ; ; In the project teams the key roles include user research, service design, front and back-end development, data engineers and delivery management. These roles will be filled through a combination of in-house expertise and hiring teams to achieve a business outcome, procured through the Digital Marketplace.
• 20. Are delivery teams already in place (e.g. Business Analysts, Developers, Testers)?: The key roles within the teams will include user research, service design, front and back-end development, data engineers and delivery management. These roles will be filled through a combination of in-house expertise and hiring teams to achieve a business outcome, procured through the Digital Marketplace.