Awarded to Methods Business and Digital Technology Limited

Start date: Monday 4 January 2021
Value: £2,000,000
Company size: SME

Birmingham City Council

IT Professional Services – Insight Programme

17 Incomplete applications

11 SME, 6 large

31 Completed applications

22 SME, 9 large

• Published: Wednesday 9 September 2020
• Deadline for asking questions: Wednesday 16 September 2020 at 11:59pm GMT
• Closing date for applications: Wednesday 23 September 2020 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

• Summary of the work: A team is required to support the delivery of the Councils Insight Programme which aims to improve; data quality, data visibility and provide the tools and assistance required to make much better use of customer insight and business intelligence to improve service efficiency and service delivery. Plus additional services.
• Latest start date: Thursday 1 October 2020
• Expected contract length: Initial priod of 12 months with a single option to extend for an additional 12 months.
• Location: West Midlands
• Organisation the work is for: Birmingham City Council

About the work

• Why the work is being done: Objective: The more effective use of data to create valuable and sustainable insight into the delivery of public services is a vital component of the Council Plan.; ; Resources are required to assist the Council in delivering the Insight programme, along with associated work packages to review Council processes and ways of working, to support the delivery of the Councils strategic plan. More detail of the Council's IT&D strategy can be found on the Councils website; https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/; ; Resources will be immediately required to support existing work.
• Problem to be solved: The Insight Programme is delivering this vision against the objectives and recommendations articulated in the; strategy to introduce new and improved Information Management and data analytics capabilities and a; functional team that will:; ; • Work iteratively with the business to improve data quality; • Provide visibility of all of our data and enable us to draw quickly on this data cross directorates for the benefit of our stakeholders and citizens; • Have the right governance, standards and frameworks in place to ensure legal and ethical compliance; • Provide the tools (self service) and assistance as required to make much better use of customer insight and business intelligence to improve service efficiency and service delivery
• Who the users are and what they need to do: As an officer I need to access to relevant, accurate, cross directorate data so that informed decisions can be made.
• Any work that’s already been done: Identification, prioritisation and ongoing delivery of use cases are delivering short term business benefits while also proving the value of developing long term strategic capabilities to manage and interrogate our data better that include:; ; • data models, data dictionary, data visualisations, POLE single entity focus (person, object, location, event) data science management, data science as a service, data collaboration partners; ; A data collaboration partner was onboarded to support the use case delivery.; ; The target operating model has been defined to provide a holistic view of the people, processes and technology to be delivered ahead of Phase 2 build and implementation.
• Existing team: Key Council staff relevant to this contract are;; ; Director, Digital & Customer Services; Chief Information Officer; Commercial Director; Heads of Service; ; Partners include: University of Birmingham
• Current phase: Alpha

Work setup

• Address where the work will take place: 10 Woodcock Street, Aston, Birmingham.
• Working arrangements: Standards for Consultancy Day Rate cards; ; Consultant’s Working Day – 8 hours exclusive of travel and lunch. ; Working Week – Monday to Friday excluding national holidays; Office Hours - 09:00 – 17:00 Monday to Friday; Travel and Subsistence – Included in day rate within Birmingham. Payable at the Council’s standard T&S rates outside Birmingham.; Mileage – As above; Professional Indemnity Insurance – included in day rate.; ; Remote working will be expected due to prevailing circumstances. On-site working may be necessary and the supplier must be capable of being on site when required at no additional cost.

Additional information

• Additional terms and conditions: Additional terms and conditions will apply and will be provided in the Specification.

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:
  • • Demonstrate experience of using service design to frame whole problem for users, for example by designing service blueprints, experience and user journey maps.
  • • Demonstrate experience of facilitating design thinking through workshops with users, senior leaders and other stakeholders to support change and transformation.
  • • Demonstrate experience of planning, carrying out and providing insight from user research, including usability testing, unmoderated user testing and accessibility.
  • • Demonstrate experience of supporting customers to build in-house capability, including transferring knowledge effectively.
  • • Demonstrate experience of an Agile delivery approach, risk mitigation, and supporting continuous improvement.
• Nice-to-have skills and experience: Demonstrate experience of delivering comparable programmes within a large local authority

How suppliers will be evaluated

All suppliers will be asked to provide a written proposal.

• How many suppliers to evaluate: 3
• Proposal criteria:
  • i. How the approach or solution meets the Council's needs
  • ii. Level of experience and skills demonstrated in designing services
  • iii. Level of experience and skills demonstrated in delivering outcomes
• Cultural fit criteria:
  • i. Work as a team with the Council and its advisors
  • ii. Ability to work with and influence stakeholders
• Payment approach: Time and materials
• Additional assessment methods:
  • Case study
  • Presentation
• Evaluation weighting:

  Technical competence

  50%

  Cultural fit

  20%

  Price

  30%

Questions asked by suppliers

• 1. Can you confirm the budget?: A maximum budget of £500,000 has been allocated for each year of the contract.; ; There will be no obligation to spend under this contract. Spend will be controlled under SoW's that will be agreed up-front for each work package.
• 2. Is there an incumbent in place?: Yes
• 3. Who's on the panel?: The panel will consist of;; Chief Information Officer; Commercial Director; Relevant Heads of Service
• 4. Can the Authority please confirm whether they have had a supplier supporting to them to get to this point in their programme?Furthermore, will this previous supplier be bidding for this next stage?: A supplier was engaged to support Phase 1 of this programme, which has been delivered.; ; The Council cannot confirm the intention of a third party. This opportunity is open to all suppliers under the framework, which includes the incumbent.
• 5. If there is an incumbent/previous supplier, can the Authority clarify their rationale for coming to market at this point please?: The outcome of phase 1 of the project was required to justify the business case to proceed with a further piece of work. As phase 2 is a much larger piece of work a procurement exercise to evaluate competing proposals was deemed appropriate.
• 6. What services are covered by the Insight Programme? Children Social Care? Adult Social Care? Housing? Etc?: The Insight Programme will inform decisions across the entire Council.
• 7. What is the name of the incumbent company?: Methods supported the delivery of phase 1.
• 8. Can you please confirm that this is a Birmingham City Council Framework or on the Crown Commercial Services Framework?: The Council will be using the Crown Commercial Service DOS framework for this contract.
• 9. Can you let us know what services (children social care, adult social care, housing, customer service) are in the scope for the project?: The Insight Programme will inform decisions across the entire Council.
• 10. Would it be acceptable to submit an application as a consortium consisting of two main parties? Or would it be preferable to have an application that nominally comes from a single party but which may subcontract some aspects of the delivery to the joint partner organisation?: For the ease of contract management a single party submission would be preferred, however a consortium submission would not be rejected.
• 11. Do you have any kind of data management framework already in place? How are you currently storing and processing your data?: There is no Council wide framework in place. Data is currently stored across numerous applications hosted in local & non-local data centres, and in the Cloud.
• 12. What tools are currently being used for visualisations and insight generation, such as bi tools like Power BI or Tableau?: There is existing tooling such as Information Steward. The capabilities of existing tooling will need to be assessed as part of the Phase 2 work.
• 13. Can you tell us how many data sources there will be and how many users there are?: The number of data sources and users will be defined as part of the Phase 2 work. This programme is expected to inform better decision making for all Council services, and will therefore have a wide scope.
• 14. Are there any data or Business Intelligence experts already in the organisation?: There are none currently assigned to this project.
• 15. What technologies/tools have been utilised by the Council as part of the first phase of work completed?: Only existing tooling was used as part of the Phase 1 work. Tooling & Technology will need further investigation as part of Phase 2.
• 16. What level of design and delivery has been completed in Phase 1 of the work?: The Phase 1 work covered; Business readiness, delivery of targeted use cases (not at scale), onboarding of a data collaboration partner, and an outline target operating model to support the business case for Phase 2.
• 17. What data sources have been included in Phase 1 of the work? Internal or external, transactional or aggregated?: Phase 1 included 3 uses cases which used targeted information for specific purposes. For example, the Housing use case covered anonymised internal and external (open data).
• 18. What is the scale/magnitude of Phase 1 data sources? Does it cover 5 or less, 6 to 10, or more than 10 different unique feeds?: The Phase 1 data sources were limited only to the use cases, which were small in scope.
• 19. Does Phase 1 involve incorporating data into a single "reporting" database, or blending separate source feeds into user visualisations? (bypassing the database stage): This will be a task for Phase 2.
• 20. Who is the target audience for Phase 1 analysis? Is it members, executives, directorate leads/managers, team leaders, and/or operational staff?: The stakeholders for Phase 1 ranged from operational staff through to members.