Who to contact - Service Manual

If your organisation or business area does not have a DPO, you should ask for procurement support from a Scottish Government procurement team:

Shared Services Team

If you work for an agency of the Scottish Government, a non-departmental public body, tribunal or national service, you should contact the Shared Services Team. They have been involved in a wide range of procurements delivering IT systems, IT services and software.

Send an email to the Shared Services Team

Major Programme Implementation Procurement

Major Programme Implementation Procurement (MPIP) provide procurement support to:

the Social Security Programme
Social Security Scotland
Employability
the National Care Service
Consumer Scotland

Send an email to MPIP

Digital Commercial Service (DCS)

DCS is a partnership between the Scottish Government’s Scottish Procurement & Property Directorate (SPPD) and Digital Directorate.

If the digital service or product you’re working on is a Digital Directorate or Corporate Transformation Directorate project, you should contact DCS.

DCS can support you by offering:

advice - including advice about overall procurement or the suitability of your existing solutions
strategic or complex digital procurements - including supporting the delivery of the digital service or product you need
industry engagement - DCS can offer you direct access to digitally centred companies and opportunities to engage with industry leaders

You can get in touch with the Digital Commercial Service via our contact us form. When filling in the form, you should select the help that you need. Your options include requesting:

advice
help with procuring a digital product or service
coordination and facilitation of industry engagement

Scottish Government Procurement Team

The Scottish Government Procurement Team (SGPT) provides support to customers in the core Scottish Government, outwith Digital Directorate, the Corporate Transformation Directorate and More Powers Implementation Procurement.

SGPT have awarded digital contracts including Tech Scalers, Digital Evidence Sharing Capability and Electronic Counting.

Send an email to the SGPT

If you work for the Scottish Government, you should start your procurement process by contacting your directorate's DPO.

If you do not have a DPO, or you work for an agency of the Scottish Government or another organisation under the Technology Assurance Framework, check who you need to contact.

Starting your procurement with your DPO or a procurement specialist

When contacting your DPO or procurement specialist, you should be able to explain your procurement requirements. For very basic, low value procurements, you will not need to give extensive details, but for everything else you should be able to explain:

the needs of your users - you should have a good sense of your users' requirements from the discovery phase of your project and from carrying out user research
what advice you've had from subject matter and technical experts that have helped you form your requirements - if you work for the Scottish Government, you should fill in a questionnaire that will help put you in contact with some of the people who can provide the specialist technical advice you'll need

At this point of the process, you should only be thinking of your procurement in terms of requirements - what needs must be met - rather than in terms of buying a specific product or service.

If you work within the Scottish Government, an Accountable Officer Form will also need to be completed before any procurement can take place.

Your DPO or procurement specialist will help you decide the best way to procure what you need.

The best route to procuring what you need depends on a number of factors including cost and how common your requirements are. Things your DPO or procurement specialist will look at are whether:

for a common, low value procurement within the Scottish Government, an ePC can be used to quickly buy something to meet your requirements
a Scottish Government reusable component, such as ScotPayments, ScotAccount or the Cloud platform can be used - if possible, reusing existing Scottish Government components will save your service time and money

If reuse is not suitable, it's likely your DPO or procurement specialist will need to go to the external market with your requirements to buy what you need. It's important to note that you do not need to do anything to start the process of going to market - it's the responsbility of your DPO or procurement specialist to oversee this process - though they may need to involve you in some aspects of market engagement, such as speaking to suppliers to explain your requirements.

Your DPO or procurement specialist will also let you know if supporting documents, like a specification document, need to be produced as part of this process.

Find out more about the options when going to market, including procurement frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems.

You'll need to evaluate offers from suppliers with your DPO or procurement specialist.

During this process, your DPO or procurement specialist will undertake a commercial evaluation of offers and you will need to undertake a technical evaluation to check which offer best meets your requirements.

You should set up a Tender Evaluation Panel within your team to conduct your technical evaluation. This panel should involve senior leads on your project, such as Service or Product Owners, and include appropriate digital expertise.

You'll need to make sure that what the panel decides to buy as a result of your technical evaluation is evidenced as:

meeting the Digital Scotland Service Standard (DSSS), especially DSSS criteria about choosing the right technology, understanding your users and accessibility
having a documented decision process - you might capture your evaluation in a Technology Options Appraisal document, especially if your procurement is complex or there are a high number of offers, but how you evidence your evaluation is up to you as long as your documentation is robust

The commercial evaluation, carried out by your DPO or procurement specialist, will often include 'weightings'. These will be applied to help prioritise your requirements, and evaluate which offer meets them in the most cost-effective way.

Once you've made the decision about what you're going to procure, your DPO or procurement specialist will sign a contract with the successful supplier.

Your contract will be a fully integrated, consistent suite of documents. It will define:

what you're buying, i.e. a specification
the method and timeframe for delivery, risk allocation and other key commercial terms, e.g. the payment mechanism and KPIs
what happens if things go wrong, i.e. that critical risk allocation is defined and properly reflected in the contract

The contract also makes sure:

decisions on contractual roles and responsibilities are documented
the rights and obligations of each party, and the associated contractual processes required to implement your procurement, are defined clearly

If the procurement was done through a framework, your supplier will generally have already signed up to pre-agreed, robust terms and conditions as part of their successful entry to a framework. If the procurement was done through a dynamic purchasing system, or in another way, this will not be the case, so your DPO or procurement specialist will help you put the terms together from a set of standard terms and conditions used for Scottish Government procurement contracts.

Proportionality

The complexity of your contract will match the scale, complexity, criticality and lifecycle of the goods or services your contract is for. If it's an ongoing product or service, you’ll need to make sure that your team is resourced to actively manage the relationship with your supplier and the product or service delivered through the contract.

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