ADD2622 GLA OPS Functional Audit

1.1 Open Project System (OPS) is a product that supports 50 funding programmes, most related to Housing and Land (H&L) and Skills and Employment but including MOPAC, the Environment Team and Regeneration

1.2. The current grant giving service is made up of a suite of products; the bespoke OPS product itself managing grants and allowing partners to request and be awarded grant, the Skills Gateway, a bespoke learner records system which interfaces with OPS and Jaspersoft, an off-the-shelf licenced reporting solution for both OPS and Skills Gateway.

1.3. Over £10.8bn approved grant funding has flowed through OPS since its inception in 2016, and of this, over £5.3bn of grants have been paid via OPS. In addition to this, there is £2.1bn spend on internal land projects managed via OPS.

1.4. A review of the OPS Service was required following the ongoing challenges faced by the support team as well as the departments using the solutions owing to the inability to scale up and efficiently respond to changing requirements.

1.5. A previous approval, ADD2588, approved the first phase of discovery for OPS.

1.6. Phase 1 – OPS Discovery was conducted over July – November and has now concluded with some key recommendations on next steps. The aim of this discovery was to consider; how can we make OPS more sustainable and efficient for the current two main customers: H&L and Skills.

1.7. The discovery identified the key pain points and areas of concern with the current products, and the technical concerns and constraints. The overall findings have resulted in a clear recommendation that “the issues with the OPS system are so critical and deeply ingrained, the GLA should seek to replace it”.

1.8. The recommendations split the work into two main workstreams. The first relates to stabilising the current service, and some improvements and changes we can make in terms of process and knowledge sharing.

1.9. The second workstream looks forward and aims to explore and understand organisational wide requirements, and ultimately identify fit for purpose solutions. This includes identifying and installing a service owner for grant and loan services across the GLA. This needs to be someone who is able to own GLA grant giving and loans at a corporate level, providing a corporate steer on practices and processes.

1.10. We also require a full functional audit of the current OPS suite, to fully understand what is currently possible. This, in conjunction with the work the service owner will undertake on alignment, will allow gaps to be identified to help shape future solutions.

1.11. We require the functional audit to produce a full product catalogue for both OPS and the Skills Gateway. This should include a detailed explanation of the interface between both products, as well as the interface between OPS and SAP. The OPS/SAP interface audit should include points of dependency on TfL.

1.12. The service provider for phase 1 was procured via GCloud 12 in June 2022. Search criteria were submitted into the Digital Marketplace to shortlist suppliers on GCloud 12 (software) according to specific criteria.

1.13. The shortlisting yielded 3 potential suppliers. In order to make a decision, an unscored request for proposal was submitted to the suppliers to determine their relevant experience, skills and expertise in the area of the GLA’s required delivery aspects. The suppliers were also asked to provide a fixed cost for the work based on their pricing schedule detailed on GCloud12.

1.14. As a result of this exercise, a decision was made to award the contract to Marvell Consulting under ICT14131, GLA Ops Discovery on 15th July 2022.

1.15. The current call-off contract allows for the procurement of further services and the services the subject of this approval fall within the scope of the original call-off contract. Therefore the Marvell Consulting, the supplier who delivered phase 1, has been appointed to deliver this next stage of the discovery work.

1.16. This procurement route has been chosen following advice from TfL’s procurement team.

1.17. A further approval will be sought for the wider phase 2 discovery (which we are currently preparing to advertise via the digital market place) which will allow us to explore in more detail the requirements across the GLA for grant and loans management.

2.1 The functional audit will allow the GLA to:

i. create a product catalogue to help us explore how and where we may be able to standardise processes, consolidate reusable components or data structures to aid future development, gap analysis and growth (while avoiding previous mistakes/issues)

ii. contribute to the creation of a strategic roadmap to identify and prioritise the work we need to undertake to deliver new, cost effective and fit for purpose solutions for use across grant giving at the GLA.

.3.1 The GLA has an obligation under the Public Sector Equality Duty enshrined within the Equality Act 2010, to consider how its policies and decisions affect people who are protected under the Act.

3.2. The GLA will take appropriate steps to ensure there are no potential negative impacts on those with protected characteristics in relation to the work undertaken in this exercise and the recommendations taken forward. This will be done by ensuring compliance with the Mayor’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy; and developing and testing in line with GLA guidance on equalities and diversity.

3.3. Individual teams will identify and evaluate the likely impact of new programmes on those with protected characteristics. The GLA OPS Delivery Team will also consider those with protected characteristics when analysing business requirements and system design. The minimum requirement for the GLA OPS system is for the site to meet WCAG 2.0 level AA accessibility. Any future development will comply with this requirement.

4.1 The key risks associated with this decision are as follows:

Links to Mayoral strategies and priorities

4.2 An effective grant management system supports the achievement of GLA priorities in the areas where teams use it. This helps ensure Londoners benefit from the outcomes and outputs delivered via grant awarded to partner organisations.

4.3. This decision links to Mayoral and corporate strategies across the following areas:

Governance

4.4 GLA OPS fully supports the GLA’s Anti-Fraud and Corruption Policy & Response Plan, specifically section 5.8, “developing systems in a way that limits and addresses the risk of fraud.” GLA OPS has been built with multiple safeguards in place to reduce the risk of fraud. For example, two officers must authorise payments and officers are assigned payment thresholds (controlled by the GLA Finance Team) in accordance with an access and permissions model.

4.5. A functional audit will allow us to deep dive into these measures and ensure we know where to focus efforts to improve things and what we should avoid for future solutions

Technology Strategy

4.6 GLA OPS’ implementation is consistent with a number of aims in the “Digital and Technology Strategy and Programme 2019”:

i. to support Smart ways of working and Agile development to deliver better designed services;

ii. making greater use of Cloud based services to support flexible working;

iii. have infrastructure that is scalable, reliable, resilient and with the capacity to cope with greater load;

iv. prioritising the use of open source systems (to reduce our costs and to produce reusable and sustainable components); and

v. to create services that customers and citizens find: useful, well designed, meets user needs, gets the information they seek in the fastest possible time and meets digital service standards. 4.7. There are no conflicts to declare from any of those involved in the drafting or clearance of this decision form.

This paper requests approval for funding of a full functional audit of current grant management solutions, OPS and Skills Gateway. This builds on the work under ADD2588, which approved work to address immediate issues and begin research on needs of end users for the GLA current grant and loans management system. This will be the next phase of a comprehensive review of the GLAs requirements and is expected to complete before end of March 2023.

The estimated expenditure for this phase is £30,000, which will be funded from the Digital Experience Transformation budget. Approval for further phases will be sought once the detail of GLA requirements has been evaluated.