Tomorrow is the deadline for suppliers to notify United Utilities of their interest in finding out more about the water company's requirements for an external provider of digital services support staff capability.

Earlier this month the water company launched a market engagement exercise to find out supplier availability of services of personnel including temporary staff to supplement their digital service requirement.

United Utilities are looking for a third party who can provide adequate resources to its Digital Services projects when its internal pool is running low.

The water company wants to hear from suppliers who can provide personnel for the following areas:

• Architectures
• Business Analysis
• Business Change Managers
• Project Managers

United Utilities say the resources, which it will be looking to purchase on a day rate, be required for a long or short period of time. The supplier would therefore need to ensure they have the capacity and flexibility to be available when required.

The utility is looking to obtain specialised resources for Digital Services projects who will be able to start immediately, as and when required.

Currently, United Utilities' internal Digital Services (IT) obtain temporary resource from an existing framework, which includes roles for architecture, delivery, business change and other adhoc roles that may be required.

Challenges associated with this approach include:

• Lack of flexibility - UU Digital Services take on staff on a full time basis, however often the resource is not required for a full 5 days a week, meaning the time is filled up on other non-value adding activities.
• Management of staff – there is currently a significant overhead associated with engaging and managing agency contract resource for UU.

Current on boarding time for temporary staff is 6 – 8 weeks, with much of this time due to United Utilities’ own internal processes and timescales.

Under the service the water company is now looking for from a specialist supplier, it would not have to follow the same process which would allow for a quicker on boarding process.

UU Digital Services also require a flexible resourcing service to accommodate requests that come in from other business areas such as Domestic Retail and Wholesale. Hoewever, it does not always have resources available to respond to the increased demand of projects.

This means that once all resources have been deployed, and are in use on projects , it then needs to turn to a third party with a clear standard of expertise and knowledge to ensure the job is done effectively.

According to United Utilities, if it does not have this option in place, it will cause a backlog in projects and potentially bring some to a halt until resources are available.

United Utilities is asking suppliers interested in providing these services to supply it with preliminary information - company name, address and contact details by 12 noon tomorrow. Click here to access the PIN documentation.

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