EU Railway Agency looks for fast and flexible IT developer

Call: External Service Provision – European Railway Agency Information Systems Development 7

Buyer: European Railway Agency (ERA), Valenciennes

Framework contract for 4 years / estimated value excluding VAT: €5.000.000

Deadline for receipt of tenders: 17/04/2024

Background and objectives: “ESP-EISD 7: External Service Provision for ERA’s Information Systems Development” is intended as a service to support the operational functions of ERA by providing a fast and flexible way of satisfying the needs for off-site Agency’s information systems development, maintenance, studies and support.
The objective of the envisaged framework contracts is the:
› Analysis and design of information systems, their development, their implementation and maintenance,
› Conception of information systems, the analysis of their requirements, their quality and security, enterprise architecture and IS specific studies,
› User support, training and documentation, information systems production and administration.
The activities performed under this procedure may concern all types of information systems supported by or implemented on different devices (e.g., desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc.) and all applications’ areas (e.g., data processing and information management applications, document management applications, etc.)
Explicitly excluded from the services covered by this framework contract are those related to Interoperable Data, Linked Data, Knowledge Graphs, Ontologies and Semantic Web technologies and the systems supporting them. Those services shall be covered by the ESP-ESISDID framework contract.
Services shall be provided based on:
› Fixed-price (FP) specific contracts, which correspond to the order of a defined work,
› Quoted Time & Means (QTM) specific contracts, which correspond to the order of pre-defined set of requirements (organized into tasks and sub- tasks) to be delivered during a specific contract, or
› Off-site Time & Means (OTM) specific contracts, which correspond to the order of services delivered off-site by individuals with specific technical profiles during a specific contract.
Both Fixed-price (FP), Quoted Time & Means (QTM) and Off-site Time & Means (OTM) service provision modes are mainly executed extra-muros, but the possibility of requesting provision of services at the location of delivery for specific tasks will be foreseen, with certain limitations.

Types of services
The specific contracts implementing this framework contract can include one or more of the services described below.
If the specific contract includes more than one of the services described below, special attention shall be taken to not include services that result in conflict of interests, as detailed in Section B – 11.4 Professional conflicting interests.
In general, services that are to be managed using a ‘project management’ approach (i.e. unique single instance of an activity detailed in the technical annex of the specific contract, including a time-line with relevant milestones and leading to well identified and defined deliverables, within a specific period of time) shall be implemented by means of Fixed Price (FP) or Quoted Time & Means (QTM) contracts. Examples of those are:

• The gathering of requirements for a specific functionality to be developed, resulting in a ‘technical requirements document’.
• The analysis of a technical requirements document, resulting in a ‘system design document’.
• The development of a new system or functionality, or the modification of an existing one, resulting in some source code, binary code and system documentation.
• The design, development, implementation or execution of test plans.
• The deployment of a system, according to the system documentation, resulting in the system deployed and a set of ‘deployment documentation.
• The design, development or delivery of training initiatives.
• The drafting of technical documentation.
• The implementation of specific corrective maintenance measures, deriving from change requests or bug fixes.
• Other activities that do not involve ‘stand-by duty’ by the contractor.
  In general, services that are to be managed using a ‘service management’ approach (i.e. activities that cannot be specified in detail in the technical annex but will be defined only in general terms, with further specification during the execution of the contract, and that lead to deliverables that cannot be defined in advance) shall be implemented by means of Off-site Time & Means (OTM) contracts. Examples of those are:
• Activities related to technical support, such as different levels of help-desk or service-desk, whenever those are contracted as global on-going activities (e.g. ‘provide 3rd level technical support to stakeholders dealing with incident and problem tickets’) and not as a specific one-time activity (e.g. ‘resolve level 3 ticket with id X’)
• Activities related to the daily administration, maintenance and operations of systems in any environment (development, test, production…), such as patching and updating, monitoring, implementing of backup plans, incident management, etc… whenever those are contracted as a global on-going activity (e.g. ‘ensuring the proper operation of system X’) and not as a specific one-time activity (e.g. ‘applying patch a.b on software Z in system X’)
• Other activities that would involve ‘stand-by duty’ by the contractor.