Defence Online

Type of document: Contract Notice
Country: United Kingdom

1. Title: EBSA EVOLUTION AND BUSINESS SERVICES
2. Awarding Authority: Home Office, GB. Web:
3. Contract type: Service contract
4. Description: Delivering capability to build, run and monitor applications used to transact with the Home Office; strong architecture; engineering leadership capability; accountability for platform design; infrastructure integration; driving ongoing tooling/ process innovation, continuously exploring industry improvements; making operational efficiencies and reduce costs; secure network boundary controls; integration with 3rd parties.
5. CPV Code(s): 72000000, 72200000
6. NUTS code(s): UKJ, UKI, UKI6, UKI62
7. Main site or location of works, main place of delivery or main place of performance: Location South East England
Address where the work will take place The majority of the services are expected to be based at our London and Croydon sites. However, the successful supplier must be capable of providing the service nationwide.
However, due to the current government guidelines the supplier will be asked to work remotely and when required work on site. It is envisaged that suppliers will be required to attend office locations at least 40% of the working week.
The work will be divided into Statements of Work (SOWs) which will clearly identify the relevant base location
8. Reference attributed by awarding authority: Proc 713:
9. Estimated value of requirement: Budget range The maximum budget for the initial term of the contract is capped at £37 million GBP.
For the extension period the maximum budget available is £9.25 Million GBP .
Total including all extension options is: £46.25 million GBP.
10. Closing date for applications 5.4.2022 (23:59).
11. Address to which they must be sent: For further information regarding the above contract notice please visit
12. Other information: Deadline for asking questions Tuesday 29 March 2022 at 11:59pm GMT
Latest start date Monday 23 May 2022
Expected contract length 2 years + 6 months
Why the work is being done The Environment Build Support and Administration platform (EBSA) is a Home Office AWS cloud secure and scalable environment. It provides hosting for existing and newly approved Home Office applications, to quickly deliver business value to our Citizens and Business teams. Delivering ‘evolution, business delivery, support cloud tooling platforms’ providing: strong architecture; engineering leadership capability; accountability for platform design; infrastructure integration of all services using tooling platforms; gaining approval of new tooling platforms through HO TDA; driving ongoing tooling/ process innovation, continuously exploring industry improvements. making operational efficiencies and reduce costs. To date, there are circa 4000 users on the platform.
These are the anticipated roles, but not limited to:
DevOps Engineer
Infrastructure Engineer
Infrastructure Architect
Delivery Manager/Scrum Master
Tech writers
Technical Business Analysis
User researchers
Product Owners/Managers
Problem to be solved The EBSA platform was first established in 2015, continuing to deliver capability for Home Office applications. This exercise seeks to identify the appropriate partner organisation to own and deliver the next phase of the EBSA mode of operation to enterprise platform.
Deliver strategic platform initiatives to enable enterprise cloud platform
Continued support of EBSA Platform services, including and not limited to monitoring, logging, security, collaborative tooling, IAM, account vending
Onboarding of new services and support for new demand from existing tenants
Technical Design authority, driving ongoing tooling, process innovation, continuous industry improvements, making operational efficiencies and reduce costs
Who the users are and what they need to do The EBSA platforms services a number of different users types:
Indirect end users transacting with the Home Office on a daily basis for Immigration, Passports, Citizenship to securely execute use cases in a high availability environment
Direct end users, who make use of the tools owned by the EBSA team and require a complete suite of tools which allow them to develop, test, deploy, maintain, and monitor their applications in a secure, self-service, scalable way. Users are across the Digital Data Technology (DDaT) programme, including Border Force, HM Passport Office, Immigration Enforcement and UK Visas and Immigration.
Early market engagement
Any work that’s already been done EBSA is a standing self-service cloud platform, initially setup to support one Home Office department. The Platform evolved, with leading industry technologies, to meet the changing needs of the department and hosts the vast majority of HO applications, and tens of thousands of users.
Platform evolution is ongoing to maximise efficiency and minimise costs, including onboarding of new tenants and 3rd Party integrations. We have a number of initiatives underway to deliver our technical roadmap, this roadmap will continue to grow during the transition period. The successful supplier will be responsible for owning, delivering and developing this when onboarded.
Existing team The existing team is based on a Platforms model, adopting a broad range of technology roles. The future team is expected to continue to enhance and optimise team capabilities and reduce lead time to fulfil requests, build in quality and make work visible. Our current team size is approx. 80 people, consisting of Management, Product, Site Reliability, Service Delivery; Delivery Managers and 24×7 on call team. Environment is multi-disciplinary/multi vendor; contracted supplier will develop strong collaborative working relationships with existing HO DDaT portfolio and supplier teams to deliver quality services.
Current phase Not applicable
Working arrangements The service will be required to work to standards and practices set by Government Digital Service and Home Office Teams.
Resources are expected to work as part of existing delivery teams focused on specific outcomes, a mixture of civil servants and contractors across the Platform.
The work will be divided into Statements of Work (SoWs) which will clearly identify the relevant primary location.
Expenses will not form part of the cost unless the supplier is asked to work from a secondary location instead during the execution of the work relating to the SoW.
Security clearance Provider personnel (and sub-contractors) must comply with Home Office security standards. SC clearance is required for all personnel as a minimum and in some instances, NPPV3 clearance. The cost of clearance is met by the Supplier.
Additional information
Additional terms and conditions The work will be subject to the terms of the DOS 5 framework, Call Off Contact and conducted under individual SoW’s, subjected to either Fixed priced, T&M or Capped T&M, as required.
Travel expenses are payable for journeys outside the specified SoW base locations, with prior customer approval, in line with HO Travel policy (subsistence is not payable).
Professions rate caps will be applied to all standard roles at all SFIA levels.
Seasonal furloughs may be required.
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
Evidence resources have existing SC clearances and the ability to rapidly onboard resources from contract start date
Evidence of a robust transition plan, how the plan will be managed to successful completion, assuring continuity of service when the incubment exits. Please include expected benefits during this period.
Demonstrable evidence of capability to rapidly stand up high functioning DevOps teams, ~80 FTEs , and scale team sizes up and down at short notice with the following skills:
Terraform, Kubernetes, Dynatrace, Vault, ELK, Confleunce, JIRA, Bitbucket, Jenkins, RedHatSSO, Prometheus, plus broad range of AWS services
Explain your approach to drive innovation, CI and modern engineering approaches to deliver technical products and services. Detail how you successfully balanced technical debt whilst maintaining high engineering quality standards?
Demonstrate ability to support continuous project delivery, deploying services onto centrally managed cloud tooling platform, day to day support, understanding of application architecture, and managing cross team and programme dependencies
Demonstrate recent experience leading on the latest cloud networking standards, utilising new technologies such as AWS Transit Gateways, WAF’s, VPN’s and proxies
Demonstrate recent experience of producing an Enterprise Cloud scaleable and securely segregated model. Such as Account Vending, Landing Zones and Control Tower
Please provide evidence of how you have successfully used detailed metrics to demonstrate actual progress in reporting cycles. Outline how you intend to do so for the EBSA platform.
Demonstrate your workpackage approach to ensure our requirements are clearly captured and delivery is assured to quality, time and budgetary tolerances. Please include evidence of how you satisfy legislative requirements.
Demonstrate how you ensure your teams remain on track to deliver, strive for success beyond what is required, maintain clear communication and visibility of deliverables and escalate when appropriate
Demonstrable evidence of the 24 x 7 out of hours support model, including resourcing, problem resolution, escalation, root cause analysis, lessons learnt and inter dependent supplier handoffs and management.
Demonstrate how you drive lean methodologies in the delivery of ‘DevOps as a Service’, optimising efficiency and the removal of unecessary overheads, including mature cost optimisation techniques on public cloud
Demonstrate ability providing L3 operational cloud tooling platform support, including: incident, change and problem management; application, infrastructure and security management; running operational procedures.
Provide evidence of continuously improving the above operational processes and how you collaborate with L1 and L2 teams in your feedback, see bullet above
Demonstrate recent experience of AGILE Delivery Managers, Product Managers and, teams to deliver products and services, maintain delivery momentum, planning, programme and project dependency, collaboration, reporting and consistent communication loops
Demonstrable recent experience deploying DevOps /SRE practices at scale to manage and evolve live services in a highly dynamic environment, demonstrating successful adoption of new tooling, process and procedures
Demonstrable evidence of recent experience leading, creating and maintaining platform vision and translating this to delivery roadmaps in line with changing organisational demand.
Demonstrate proactive account leadership, financial governance, willingness and adapting to dynamic needs, decision making and a data driven methods of measuring success, include account management support roles, processes and tools.
Demonstrate how you will utilise your broader industry knowledge to provided added value. For example bringing in industry best practice and partners to contribute to the delivery and solutions.
Nice-to-have skills and experience
Demonstrate 3+ years recent practical experience of change management to achieve direct user engagement and adoption of new platform tools, procedures and processes
Demonstrate proactive account leadership to deliver the level of support and resources required to foster knowledge transfer and on track, quality deliverables in a multi-vendor, multi-disciplinary approach and environment
How suppliers will be evaluated
All suppliers will be asked to provide a written proposal.
How many suppliers to evaluate 5
Proposal criteria
Onboarding and transition
Technology
Organisation
Work packages
Out of Hours Approach
Account Leadership
Innovation
Essential Skills and Experience
Approach and Methodology
Live Service Support and Service Improvement
Added Value / Value for Money
Cultural fit criteria Social Value
Payment approach Fixed price
Additional assessment methods
Evaluation weighting
Technical competence
70%
Cultural fit
10%
Price
20%
TKR-2022322-EX-1791044