Closure Report

Phase One - Procurement

Assess Third Party Solutions that would enable the University to satisfy the statutory requirements associated with the current fire safety legislation and operational HESA reporting, whilst enabling continuous improvement to achieve best practice.

No - Reduced / withdrawn from scope 28-Aug-2019 as part of PICCL #3:  Reduce Scope and Move Towards Closure After Business Completed a Non-Competitive Agreement with a Supplier, please see the 'Outcome' below for further detail.

The Business have confirmed that Riskbase potentially delivers this functionality and it could be utilised at no additional cost, but if so this would be researched / adopted at a later stage.

Yes, partly - this was analysed / documented as part of the Business Requirements workshops (D2 above), however not finalised as a consequence of an actual solution not being chosen or implemented as part of the Project, by the Project Team.

The Business have confirmed that RiskBase has a site license model.

This did not occur as part of the formal Project, with engagement with the Project Team due to only one response being received to the ITT.  Therefore this deliverable was reduced / withdrawn from scope 28-Aug-2019 as part of PICCL #3:  Reduce Scope and Move Towards Closure After Business Completed a Non-Competitive Agreement with a Supplier, please see the 'Outcome' below for further detail.

No - Reduced / withdrawn from scope 28-Aug-2019 as part of PICCL #3:  Reduce Scope and Move Towards Closure After Business Completed a Non-Competitive Agreement with a Supplier, please see the 'Outcome' below for further detail.

The Business have made it clear that at all stages they were open to making any possible process changes that might be required to adopt any agreed / appropriate solution 

Project stayed within scope?

(Yes/No); Reason if not.

1  The Fire Risk Assessment, the resultant action plan, the allocation of tasks and the confirmation of tasks completed

2  The Fire Logs incorporating the process flow to allocate annual fire drills and weekly fire tests and the subsequent results

3  The process to record Fires, incidents and fire alarm activations

4  The process to manage fire related assets such as fire extinguishers and blankets

5  Management information

6  User access throughout the University

8  Make recommendations / apply any change of process that might be required in order to adapt to a third party solution implementation

9  Implement the chosen solution

10  Investigate Single Sign On

Achieved? 

To enable the University of Edinburgh to meet their statutory obligations with regard to the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006 any supplier/solution must meet the criteria described in this RFI and will preferably hold appropriate fire management accreditation

Moving to a system will unify and improve the management of all the data, that is currently time consuming to collate and should close the known data gaps in all the key fire safety areas being collected and recorded

Although the Business do not have the fire drills etc. part of this, they will have the risk assessment and action plan element. So far the Business can see the benefits will include:

• Quicker risk assessment process as the form can be filed in electrically on the go by the risk assessors using an app which does not require internet connection as the system will merge/download from the ipad once back in range
• Images can be added to each question and/or action on the go as well as generally, which will enable users to quickly identify the areas which require remedial actions
• Previous risk assessments are available to the assessor whilst undertaking the assessment, meaning they can comment on issues which may have been picked up on, and not actioned, from a previous assessment
• Standard actions can easily be added by assessors on the go if they find that similar actions are coming up again and again, therefore reducing time manually adding them each time
• Actions can be automatically assigned – either by role or by type of action. For example, a School action can be assigned to a specific building manager and an Estate action to the Estates generic role in the system

Once an assessment is complete, the system will email a report (which is automatically generated) to the named individuals with clearly identified responsibilities for remedial actions using clear colour coding and risk levels, as assigned by the Fire Safety Unit

As an observation - there may be a piece of work to integrate with UoE email system if the system generated emails are to be sent from a ‘UoE account’ as opposed to being sent by the supplier RiskBase (if this is a Business Requirement at a later stage)

Dashboard and MI reporting

• Admin have an overall view of the status of all risk assessments as well as all actions – both completed and outstanding. These can be easily filtered down with graphical displayed produced automatically
• This data can also be downloaded to be further manipulated if desired in CSV format
• Individual risk assessors can see their own workload on their dashboard
• In time, once we add school users, their own dashboards will also be personalised to show their risk assessments and actions

The Project utilises a Public Information Notice (PIN) / Request For Information (RFI) to determine potential solutions within the marketplace

A Procurement strategy is chosen / utilised

Business requirements are understood / documented to allow a detailed / consistent question set to undertake procurement / evaluation

Successful identification and procurement of an appropriate / best fit solution that:

• Enables the scheduling, recording, scoring, tracking and sharing of Fire Risk Assessments including resultant outcomes, actions and action plans
• Enables the scheduling and recording of fire drills and tests as well as the generation and sharing of operational reports
• Enables the recording and tracking of fire, incident and alarm activations as well as the generation and sharing of operational reports (to be agreed with Security) if selected for implementation during the procurement phase

H&S / Fire Safety Unit have access to key reports / MI that will be identified during analysis

All Users of any chosen solution / system are correctly identified and provided with appropriate, licensed, access

Successful implementation of the appropriate / best fit solution

Yes - The Business took the decision to implement  their chosen solution their self, the agreed implementation plan between RiskBase and the Business is contained within the Procurement Checklist recorded in Issue #4:  Business Chose to Complete a Non-Competitive Agreement (NCA) with a Supplier Without Fully Engaging IS / Procurement.  Therefore this was not as part of the Project and this was reduced / withdrawn from scope of the Project, 28-Aug-2019 as part of PICCL #3:  Reduce Scope and Move Towards Closure After Business Completed a Non-Competitive Agreement with a Supplier, please see the 'Outcome' below for further detail.  

Successful application of the appropriate / best fit solution and agreeing / making any required Business Process Changes if / where necessary

Yes - The Business are satisfied that the RiskBase solution meets these criteria and they made it clear that at all stages they were open to making any possible process changes that might be required to adopt any agreed / appropriate solution, however again this was not as part of the Project as this was reduced / withdrawn from scope of the Project, 28-Aug-2019 as part of PICCL #3:  Reduce Scope and Move Towards Closure After Business Completed a Non-Competitive Agreement with a Supplier, please see the 'Outcome' below for further detail

When working towards a Revenue Budget, being funded by the Business, that has a hard deadline of being withdrawn, at the end of the financial year, then ideally any such procurement based Project would be engaged / started with plenty of time to complete the procurement process before the risk of losing the funding.  HAS005 did complete an initial run of the procurement process, but unfortunately did not have enough time / contingency in order to attempt to reduce scope further / agree and conduct fully an alternate approach.    This could have been full Project Team engagement and support for the NCA, or with a reduction in scope, this could have included reducing the size of the question sets and potentially conducted a further, reduced ITT exercise.  This was further compounded by the hard deadline of the financial year end / end of Project activities falling into the period when key staff had annual leave, making meeting, communications and joint (Project) decisions difficult.

Small Scale Budget / Budget Banding.  Budget / associated works need to be better identified and handled.  The budget for this Project ended below the £50,000 threshold.  It was following on, utilising the findings of the previous project (CSG013 Fire Management System) that choice to engage with and follow the full procurement route (including PIN and ITT was chosen), as that project identified that there could be solutions on the market which could breach the procurement threshold.  As the ITT received no suitable applications and as a result the scope of what the system could do was reduced to try and still get something which would enable us to get some benefits within the constraint of the financial year, this inevitably reduced the cost of any system.  Feedback on the ITT from Suppliers was that there were too many questions (both Functional and IT combined) to respond to for the potential award of winning the tender.  Suggestions have been made that where smaller budgets and suppliers are known to be the most likely route for successful procurement  then a more streamlined / banded procurement processes and associated question sets could be put in place that could be applied based on Budget available.  Another suggestion was that questions for smaller scale procurement be kept to a bullet type approach. 

It would have been beneficial at the point that the budget was finalised that expectations / scope for the project potentially be reduced earlier.  The issue was that, after the PIN, where responses were received, that it needed to be gauged as to what solutions were available.   The scope was reduced once possible, firstly with the removal of PEEPS and then it was not until the tender deadline had passed that anything else could be changed.  It was still hoped that a system could be found to fulfill all of the requirements.

The Project achieved great support from Business Stakeholders as part of the requirements workshops and in willingness to engage in the selection process

The requirements workshops were very thorough and the question sets / processes were accurately and fully recorded

Similarly to the Question sets the UoE SaaS contract was far too onerous for such a small system.  The Business understand requiring this for a system which costs upwards of £50k, but this one is £8k a year.   RiskBase have a massive portfolio of clients including multi-national companies and other Universities, who have worked with them for a number of years satisfactorily.  It was questioned if reference sites were obtained / reviewed, FSU confirmed that Peer level references had been received.  Again should there be a shorter version suitable for a smaller value contract?  Another thing to consider is that none of the information being held on RiskBase is sensitive in nature or commercially confidential.