Awarded to Sopra Steria Ltd

Start date: Monday 22 October 2018
Value: £772,465.54
Company size: large

Skills for Care in partnership with the Dept. for Health & Social Care

National Minimum Dataset for Social Care - Beta (Services)

3 Incomplete applications

1 SME, 2 large

3 Completed applications

2 SME, 1 large

• Published: Thursday 6 September 2018
• Deadline for asking questions: Thursday 13 September 2018 at 11:59pm GMT
• Closing date for applications: Thursday 20 September 2018 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

• Summary of the work: Skills for Care require the provision of specific technical roles within the multi-disciplined team with the skills outlined in following sections. ; ; We are seeking to commission additional roles to scale up the team for delivering the technical aspects of beta.; ; Note: Please see previous section for details of existing team.
• Latest start date: Tuesday 16 October 2018
• Expected contract length: The contract phase will run from October 18' through to June 19'
• Location: Yorkshire and the Humber
• Organisation the work is for: Skills for Care in partnership with the Dept. for Health & Social Care
• Budget range: The budget is fixed and will not exceed £800k. (Fixed Time and Materials)

About the work

• Why the work is being done: DHSC was recently the subject of an NAO review (and subsequent Public Accounts Committee Hearing) into how they manage their responsibilities with respect to the adult social care workforce. The report made a number of recommendations particularly around implications of exit from the EU on the workforce, vacancy, turnover and accessing supply and demand data which, without NMDS-SC, DHSC will not have the level of data intelligence to implement these or other initiatives. ; The current NMDS-SC will be retired in June 19' and therefore a new service will have to be implemented in advance to provide a smooth transition.
• Problem to be solved: The current NMDS-SC system is no longer fit for purpose and no longer meets user needs. DHSC are commissioning a replacement system, which must be implemented in advance of June 19'. This Beta stage will be building on the findings from previous Discoveries and an Alpha, where various prototypes of the service where tested to determine the most appropriate approach, models and technologies to be developed to meet user needs. The prototypes have been extensively tested as part of on-going user research alongside wider user and technical experiments and will form the foundation of the new development.
• Who the users are and what they need to do: As an adult social care provider (small, medium, large or local authority provider) “data-inputter”, I need to submit data (establishment and workforce records) onto the service so that our NMDS-SC account reflects our workforce.; ; As a “data interrogator” of the NMDS-SC service (service user) I need to make use of the workforce data collected to produce insights, intelligence and management reports, so that I can make effective workforce planning decisions.
• Early market engagement: Market engagement is longstanding in this area. The NMDS-SC online system has been collecting data since November 2007 and contains information from over 20,000 care providers with over 700,000 individual worker records. Engaging with users has formed part of the daily work of Skills for Care for over ten years. Skills for Care therefore has a lot of subject knowledge with regard to engaging with the market – both in terms of organisations inputting into the system and those using the intelligence derived from the system. In terms of engagement statistics – 100% of local authorities use the system while 55% (circa 14,000 establishments) of all CQC regulated adult social care providers use the system. Skills for Care will provide contacts for user research.
• Any work that’s already been done: A discovery, commissioned by Skills for Care Ltd, established the new scope and requirements of the NMDS-SC service for Alpha. The Alpha phase has recently concluded (August 18') and has identified; through extensive user research and prototyping, the scale of technical and non-technical requirements to meet user needs going forward for a beta development. ; ; We have now completed Alpha meeting our Alpha assessment and determined our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Produce Road-map for Beta
• Existing team: There is already a multi-disciplined service team in place comprising of:; Service Owner; Delivery Manager; Product Owner; Content Designer; User researcher; Technical lead; Subject matter experts; ; We are seeking to commission additional roles to scale up the team for delivering the technical aspects of beta.; ; Note: User research and Content design are outside the scope of the requirement.
• Current phase: Beta

Work setup

• Address where the work will take place: Skills for Care: ; West Gate, ; 6 Grace Street, ; LEEDS, ; LS1 2RP
• Working arrangements: The supplier may be based anywhere but would be expected to co-locate resources, at times, in the Leeds office to work with the NMDS-SC multi-disciplined Agile team of digital and subject matter experts (Anticipate that this will be 1-2 days per week) The resources would form part of the multidiscipline team and be part of the service delivery team. The resources will work alongside the team in a combination of co-located and virtual arrangements using technologies and tools to underpin collaborative working. They would be included within rituals and attend Show & Tell, Daily Stand-ups and operate within scrum teams.
• Security clearance: Individuals /Teams must fulfil satisfactory Disclosure and Barring Checks (DBS)

Additional information

• Additional terms and conditions: None

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:
  • Expert, proven full stack development skill set, using Node.js, AngularJS and Postgres
  • Expert, proven knowledge of designing data models and working at the database level with Postgres
  • Knowledge and understanding of Oracle – to support and deliver data migration and transformation requirements of the service.
  • Proven knowledge of core programming concepts such as MVC (Model View Controller) and Object Oriented design
  • Proven ability to define and create testing strategies and automate the testing of code.
  • Experience creating bespoke web applications and authenticated APIs
  • Significant experience and expertise in Javascript.
  • Proven experience of resourcing and delivering projects using the agile project management methodology.
  • Experience working with GDS frontend toolkit, or industry equivalents such as Bootstrap or Foundation, to develop responsive websites
  • Experience working with GDS standard technologies including GOV.UK Cloud Platform as a Service, mail services and authentication; or industry equivalents.
  • Experience working to GDS Technology Code of Practice best practices; or industry equivalent best practices and open source coding standards.
  • Experience of using Git, preferably with GitHub
  • Experience of using and deploying AWS alongside PaaS, Lambda functions and S3 buckets.
  • Experience of working in Dev/Ops culture, with expertise of monitoring websites to ensure they meet availability and performance standards.
  • Proven knowledge and experience of developing services with effective User Interaction / Experience (UI) designs.
  • Proven knowledge and ability to define and implement user centric content and content structure
  • Proven knowledge of developing secure solutions that meet security standards
  • Proven experience of developing accessible solutions that meet WCAG 2.0 standards
• Nice-to-have skills and experience:
  • Knowledge or experience of User Research methods and practises
  • Knowledge or experience of Content Design
  • Knowledge and experience of developing services within an adult social care context and setting.
  • Knowledge and experience of wider health and social care data led projects

How suppliers will be evaluated

• How many suppliers to evaluate: 4
• Proposal criteria:
  • Technical knowledge and experience (outlined) together with understanding the requirements
  • Approach and methodology (Incl. Agile PM, Kanban, GDS Standards)
  • How the process and deliverables will meet the user needs.
  • Estimated timeframes for the work
  • How they’ve identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them
  • Use of tools and techniques for working collaboratively over multiple sites.
  • Team structure (including operating within an existing multi-disciplined team)
  • Value for money
• Cultural fit criteria:
  • Experience working with public sector, arms length bodies and delivery partners
  • Work transparently, collaboratively and as an extension to our team throughout the Beta.
  • Work flexibly and have the ability to adapt to specific cultures
  • Co-locate as part of a multi-disciplined team where appropriate
  • Work collaboratively across multiply locations using relevant tools and technologies
  • Attend ceremonies and meetings
  • Share knowledge and experience with other team members
  • Can work with clients with low technical expertise
  • Take responsibility for their work
  • Have a no-blame culture and encourage people to learn from their mistakes
• Payment approach: Capped time and materials
• Assessment methods: Written proposal
• Evaluation weighting:

  Technical competence

  60%

  Cultural fit

  20%

  Price

  20%

Questions asked by suppliers

• 1. Can you tell us which company or companies completed the Discovery and Alpha phases of this project?: Lagom Strategy Ltd completed the Discovery and Sopra Steria completed Alpha (supply of Alpha resources)
• 2. Is there an existing supplier who has provided the people in the current roles and if so, are you expecting them to bid for the opportunity?: A supplier has provided resources for Alpha, which has now completed. I cannot comment on whether they are likely to bid or not.
• 3. What roles would the supplier be providing in addition to the existing Skills for Care team?: Skills for Care have detailed its current resources in the specification as (Service Owner, Delivery Manager, Product Owner, Content Designer, User researcher, Technical lead and Subject matter experts). We are following the GDS service design methodology, so are anticipating requiring standard roles for this kind of project. These include roles such as Developers, Technical Architects, Tester etc.
• 4. Do you require all of the resources to be provided by a single supplier or would you consider a number of suppliers each providing part of the required resource.: We are looking to contract with one supplier