Awarded to Go Free Range Ltd

Start date: Monday 6 March 2017
Value: £190,800
Company size: SME
Government Digital Service (GDS)

WP1277 - Improving the publishing and formatting platform

0 Incomplete applications

7 Completed applications

6 SME, 1 large

Important dates

Published
Monday 23 January 2017
Deadline for asking questions
Monday 30 January 2017 at 11:59pm GMT
Closing date for applications
Monday 6 February 2017 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

Summary of the work
Improving the publishing and formatting platform.

Service Manual
Moving the manuals format to the new publishing platform and consolidating an additional manuals format to be part of a single Manuals template for Government. This includes consolidating features and build.

Asset Manager
Migrating assets onto a new, uniform, third party server.
Latest start date
23/02/2017
Expected contract length
3-6 months
Location
London
Organisation the work is for
Government Digital Service (GDS)
Budget range
No more than £750 per resource per day provided by the winning supplier.

About the work

Why the work is being done
The work has two different strands as follows:

Manuals; To ascertain the feasibility of: moving the Manuals format to be part of the new publishing platform (primarily using our Publishing API) and consolidating the manuals format to be part of a single manuals template for government. The work will also provide sufficient documentation, instruction and recommendation so that a team picking up the work in the future can easily start and complete the work

Asset Manager; To migrate assets firstly from Whitehall Publisher to Asset Manager and secondly from asset manager onto a third-party application publisher - a server.
Problem to be solved
Manuals are required to be migrated to the new publishing platform, and the business needs to assess the costs of doing so.

Migrate assets to new Asset Manager platform and third party server from Whitehall Publisher.
Who the users are and what they need to do
The GOV.UK programme’s roadmap illustrates the need to modernise architechture. Two related projects are:

Manuals
GOV.UK needs to have a better understanding of how complex the task of moving and consolidating the manuals format is. Understanding will help GOV.UK plan when to undertake the migration. The discovery will also give GDS the necessary documentation and understanding of the work so that the work could easily be completed in the future.

Asset Manager
GOV.UK needs to migrate assets from Whitehall publisher onto Asset Manager and onto a third party server, so that there is no administrative burden on GOV.UK
Early market engagement
None
Any work that’s already been done
None
Existing team
GOV.UK made up of 4 Developers, 1 Product manager and 1 Delivery manager with further team members to be added over the duration of the term supported by the business management function.
Current phase
Not started

Work setup

Address where the work will take place
Aviation House, 129, Kingsway, London, WC2B 6NH
Working arrangements
The supplier will have to work on site at Aviation House to ensure that they provide the right level of support to these applications and to integrate any changes that are made to existing and future components of GOV.UK
Security clearance
Minimum Baseline Personnel Security Standard

Additional information

Additional terms and conditions
Standard Cabinet Office terms and conditions apply.

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 technical migration
  • Delivering architectural consistency
  • Experience of consolidating features
  • Build excellent verbal and non-verbal communication skills
  • Experience of Ruby development (minimum 5 years experience)
  • Prior knowledge of AWS and SW3 (minimum 2 years experience)
  • Strong team-work skills
  • Previous experience of working with Asset Manager or similar tools
  • Experience with large scale file upload management on Linux Systems
  • Experience with a cloud based storage system.
  • At least 5 years experience with Legacy Rails applications
Nice-to-have skills and experience
  • Experience of the GOV.UK Stack or another public sector Stack
  • Experience of providing instruction and documentation to enable learning
  • Demonstrable experience of working in an agile environment

How suppliers will be evaluated

How many suppliers to evaluate
3
Proposal criteria
  • Approach and methodology
  • How the approach or solution meets user needs
  • How they’ve identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them
  • Team structure
  • Value for money
  • How the approach or solution meets your organisation’s policy or goal
Cultural fit criteria
  • Work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers
  • Transparent and collaborative when making decisions
  • Have a no-blame culture and encourage people to learn from
Payment approach
Time and materials
Assessment methods
  • Written proposal
  • Work history
  • Presentation
Evaluation weighting

Technical competence

75%

Cultural fit

5%

Price

20%

Questions asked by suppliers

1. What is the shape of the existing team working on this and what skills are GDS looking to supplement within it?
All of the sklls outlined in the essential criteria are relevant. The suppliers are expected to work largely independantly although the work will be overseen by a product manager.
2. One of the items listed under "Essential skills and experience" is "Prior knowledge of AWS and SW3". Should "SW3" be "S3" (as in Amazon S3) or is it something else?
Correct - should be Amazon S3.
3. Hello, We meet all the Essential and nice-to-have skills and experience listed for this project. We have successfully delivered projects for several government departments remotely and was wondering if you reconsider the requirement to work on-site at Aviation House? Many thanks.
We would reconsider working remotely subject to the agreement of all parties. An initial period of working on site may be helpful for gathering background knowledge
4. Is there a backlog of work that we can look at, and what sort of roles are you expecting a supplier to fill?
We can provide some documents into a mini investigation we previously did into whats involved in migrating the Manuals format to the new Publishing Platform once the supplier is appointed.
5. Are there any dependencies on other projects and workstreams, and is there a deadline for this work to be completed?
The discovery into the Asset Manager work will be timeboxed to 3 weeks, split as needed between the Whitehall migration and S3 discovery. There are no major dependencies for this discovery to be completed.