Website Product Development and Integration

Description

Summary of the work Integration of disparate functionality and microsites within the overall London.gov.uk estate, aimed at creating a consistent and harmonious digital presence. Expected Contract Length 18 - 24 months Latest start date Wednesday 6 June 2018 Budget Range £200,000 - £300,000. However, we expect bidders to submit competitive bids, broken down by resource or skill, duration and day rates applicable to each. Why the Work is Being Done The GLA’s primary website, www.london.gov.uk is the default digital service for directly providing services and promoting and informing Londoners of the work of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. As the priorities of the Mayor and Assembly develop and evolve and new priorities emerge, so must the digital services, continually engage with stakeholders in and beyond London. Problem to Be Solved For historic reasons, several special purpose microsites (e.g. for volunteering in London) and related functionality were created separate to London.gov.uk. This has created a perceived dilution of the Mayoral and Assembly brand. The integration of this disparate functionality and microsites within the overall London.gov.uk estate is aimed at creating a consistent and harmonious digital presence. The main microsite that requires integration is Team London https://volunteerteam.london.gov.uk/#s alongside https://speedvolunteer.london.gov.uk/. Subsequent sites and functionality must have the look and feel of being on london.gov.uk. Who Are the Users “As a user* I want to see as much information and use as many services as possible from one website so that I can find what I need quickly and easily” * User research carried out in 2014 for London.gov.uk identified six distinct personas for the website; London residents; activists and bloggers; job seekers; delivery professionals (e.g. local authorities); the press and businesses. As Mayoral and Assembly priorities have evolved, digital services have incorporated additional personas. Early Market Engagement There has been no market engagement. Work Already Done A first round of integrating some microsites and related functionality was carried out between late 2016 and 2017. The internal team has also compiled a starting backlog for Team London. Existing Team The GLA has an excellent team of officers who will be part of the team and two suppliers in particular who provide web development services (including support and maintenance services to London.gov.uk and microsites); The internal team consists of: •Product Owner for London.gov.uk •Delivery Manager •Content Manager •Product Owners for microsites (including the Team London site) •DevOps engineers •Infrastructure engineers •BA •Tester •Creative Team Current Phase Not started Skills & Experience • Have at least 4 years’ experience in digital business analysis • Have at least 4 years’ experience of working in multi-disciplinary Agile teams (preferably using the GDS service design manual). • Minimum 4 years’ experience of developing digital products, including release management from development, testing, pre-production and production environments using Drupal 7 / Drupal 8 modules • At least three code contributions to Drupal 7 or Drupal 8. • At 4 years’ experience of developing using MySQL and MariaDB databases underpinning Drupal websites. • At least two projects which involved the migration of content, data (on MySQL or MariaDB) and configurations from one Drupal website to another. • At least one project that involved migrating a Drupal 7 website to Drupal 8 (core, contributed and custom modules) • At least two projects which involved integrating the features, functions and content of one website into another. • At least one project that involved setting up, configuring and managing servers and associated hosting services provided by Amazon as part of AWS. • At least one project that involved experience of building an application-level package manager on Drupal 7&8 Nice to Haves • Technical and Solution Architecture: 4 years’ experience of researching, producing and, working with developers, implementing/integrating solution architectures • Microsite integration: Minimum one project in the past 3 years involving consolidating, merging and/or integrating multiple sites into one, particularly: 1)websites in Drupal, and 2)upgrading from different versions of Drupal • QA and Testing Services: 4 years’ experience of website testing including code audits, acceptance, performance, regression and creating and carrying out automated testing. Work Location Greater London Authority, City Hall, The Queen’s Walk, London SE1 2AA Working Arrangments We expect the work to be carried out from both the GLA’s location at City Hall as well as from the supplier location remotely. It is acceptable for the majority of the development work to be carried out from the supplier location but the supplier is expected to be present at City Hall for phases of work such as discovery, sprint planning, demos, retros and show and tell events etc. Security Clearance Bidders will be expected to meet the Baseline Personal Security Standard. Additional T&Cs Standard contract but details to be included - Any prices quoted must include an appropriate adjustment to reflect travel to City Hall and subsistence costs. No expenses will be paid on top of the rates quoted. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria • Proposals must address essential and nice-to-have criteria (please keep your written submission to around 1500 words, plus/minus 10%) • The proposed technical approach to carrying out the integration of multiple microsites • How you will ensure that the GLA’s aims will be met and the problem solved • What team structure you propose, given the skills required and how each team member will contribute to solving the problem and meeting the GLA’s aims • What risks you perceive in the proposed work and how you (and the wider team) can mitigate them to an acceptable level • What assumptions you are making and the services you need from the GLA • How you will ensure that the GLA gets maximum value for money by engaging your company • In your proposal, set out in detail how your proposed team meets the essential and nice-to-have skills to complete the work to the highest standard. Note any additional skills required. • How you propose to stage the work, and a proposed timetable Cultural Fit Criteria • How will you ensure that you work with the GLA team as a single team with a shared purpose? • What measures do you propose to ensure that you quickly understand the Mayor’s vision for London and apply it to your work with the GLA? • How will you ensure that you communicate with the GLA team frequently, openly, honestly and constructively challenging any pre-conceptions and involving them in decision making? Payment Approach Time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 50% Cultural fit 15% Price 35% Questions from Suppliers 1. In regards to 1. Contributed at least three lines of code to Drupal 7 or 8 - are you referring to drupal ‘core’ or contrib modules? Either, but please specify 2. Can you advise what current visitor numbers for london.gov.uk and the key microsites to be integrated, are? 10 million unique visitors to london.gov.uk last year. Team London volunteering sites - https://volunteerteam.london.gov.uk/#s and https://speedvolunteer.london.gov.uk/ . Likely London Ambitions - https://londonambitionsportal.london.gov.uk/ . Possibly phase two (some outstanding work and improvements) of Healthy Schools London - http://www.healthyschools.london.gov.uk/ . 3. What is the current hosting infrastructure? Has it move to cloud yet? Hosting is all on AWS 4. Can you provide a gauge of how the site is currently deployed across infrastructure / servers and the scale / power of those? The main london.gov.uk site runs on two AWS M4XL servers. They are configured to autoscale but that only happens occasionally in relation to specific events. Other large microsites (e.g. Talk London) might typically run on an M4L. The preferred approach of the GLA is that microsites should run on separate servers that are integrated with the main london.gov.uk server. 5. Is there currently a working Continuous Integration pipeline? There are a range of automated deployment processes using Jenkins integrated with Github and Jira. 6. Can you provide a list of all microsites being targeted in the next 24 months? Existing sites are mentioned in point 2 (Team London volunteering sites - https://volunteerteam.london.gov.uk/#s and https://speedvolunteer.london.gov.uk/ . Likely London Ambitions - https://londonambitionsportal.london.gov.uk/ . Possibly phase two (some outstanding work and improvements) of Healthy Schools London - http://www.healthyschools.london.gov.uk/). The majority of integrations are complete, but there are many projects in the pipeline requiring new functionality. These would likely be built on the sub-site model (separate code from lon.gov but integrated seamlessly from a look and feel POV). 7. Are there any problems, issues, inhibitors with the current technology, hosting, processes or codebase that you would like addressing, and that we should factor into our estimation? a) We need to move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. b) the main site is available during deploys. However, it is unavailable for editing by internal editors during the deployment and this is a problem for the business. the deployment process currently takes about 3 hours, of which roughly 2 hours is manual regression testing. The GLA wishes to move to smaller, fully automated, overnight deploys 8. Can you elaborate a little on the handoffs (or SLAs) between the internal teams, the support team (Sirius) and and the role you would see the winning bidder fulfilling? The internal team fill customer, product facing roles. This might include running requirements gathering workshops, user testing etc although this is sometimes carried out by suppliers. IT team supports a quality assurance role operating a development and test environment which is close to live. Suppliers are required to commit code to the Test environment for integration and regression testing. NB: UAT sign-off of stories must take place on the GLA Test environment (in order to ensure integration with other parts of the site). UAT sign-off on the supplier's site is not acceptable. GLA will lead on performance and security testing. 9. Have existing programmes been undertaken to assess and address any GDPR and Privacy concerns? A comprehensive programme has been undertaken by our Governance team 10. Can you please provide a list of all the microsites that need to be migrated throughout the duration of this contract? Please can you also list the technologies that they currently use and any third party services or systems that they integrate with? Point 2 covers the sites. Existing technology is a mix of Drupal and two CMSs - https://volunteerteam.london.gov.uk/ is built in CloudRed and https://speedvolunteer.london.gov.uk/ is built on a site called Do It. However, the expectation is that the sites will be built from scratch in Drupal. There are currently no known system or service integrations, outside of Drupal, for these sites. The current sites are Drupal 7 but the GLA is planning for new sites to be developed in Drupal 8 (while maintaining seamless integration with the existing Drupal 7 sites). 11. Do you have a modular component-based style guide/pattern library that can be rolled out across all integrated sites? We have a standard set of style assets and are in the process of building a set of reusable components using Composer 12. Do you have any information on user journeys and subsequent user research? If so, please can you share this vendors at this stage? This informationcan supplied on request - please contact vikramgudra@tfl.gov.uk and it will be emailed to you. 13. How effective is the overall user experience and user journey on the main site in meeting end users’ needs? Has this content been audited/validated recently to ensure that it’s meeting the needs of the GLA’s users? Do you envisage this project involving service design as well as technical expertise from the successful supplier in order to achieve the same look and feel across the GLA estate? London.gov.uk was built on some robust and extensive research and testing. Research has continued across the site on new elements and content is audited and updated regularly. However, it is a large site, and some assumptions (with UX knowledge) have been made along the way with certain functionality. Consistency across products and functionality is important to us - currently the Portfolio Manager and Product Manager lead on this, but knowledge within the supplier on this would be an advantage. 14. You state that there will be additional suppliers involved in this project. Are you aiming to work in a multi-vendor setup? If so, do you have a governance process for managing vendor relationships? We currently work with multiple vendors such as CTi and Sirius. It is likely that other suppliers may be involved in developing elements of the site over time.There are procedures in place to manage this. For example, our Github branching strategy takes account of commits from multiple suppliers. 15. Of the internal team members that you've listed, how much availability will these roles have for this specific project? "Based on previous experience, approximately:• Product Owner for London.gov.uk - 20%• Delivery Manager - 33%• Content Managers - 20%• Product Owners for microsites (including the Team London site) - 50%• DevOps engineers - 20%• Infrastructure engineers - 20%• Tester - 50%" 16. You've specified that you would like the successful supplier to provide a multi-disciplinary team. Can you specify the roles that you would expect them to provide? "These are listed in section 19 and 20, under essential and nice to have skills and experience. It is acceptable for the majority of the development work to be carried out from the supplier location however the supplier is expected to be present at City Hall for phases of work such as discovery, sprint planning, demos, retros and show and tell events etc. This is understood to mean that the supplier’s agile team members, including developers, should be present at City Hall to attend appropriate agile ceremonies. However, onsite presence by the supplier is desirable. 17. Do you have key milestones/deadlines for the integrations of these sites or will these be determined once a supplier has been selected? These can be defined once a supplier is selected. However, it is likely that resources will be required to work on more than one project at a time, with potential public beta live dates being in Autumn. 18. Please can you clarify what you mean by “application-level package manager on Drupal 7&8” in your essential skills and experience? The GLA is in the process of moving to the use of Composer for the site build process for both Drupal 7 and future Drupal 8 sites. 19. Can you please provide further information on the Mayor’s vision for London/direct us to the best place to find out more information about this? This is the most recent 'vision' info - https://www.london.gov.uk/get-involved/all-consultations/city-all-londoners 20. Which team collaboration tools do the GLA currently use across the organisation? Will the GLA team have access to collaboration tools such as Slack, Google Docs, Hangouts and Zoom.us? Slack, appear.in, Google suite, Jira / Confluence, Trello, Microsoft Office 365 / Sharepoint, Github.