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Foreword
Graham Jones
Partners, suppliers and the Programme Team have together made significant progress on all five strands of the programme. Early milestones for OAA have been met and the evaluation panel have agreed that IDOX should be our preferred supplier for OPIS. Procurement of an OLP solution is also making excellent progress.
We are pleased with the ongoing development of SEPA and Historic Scotland's back office systems. Further work is being undertaken with the other consultees to improve the electronic communication with planning authorities.
Important decisions on the way forward with Expert systems and E-consultation triggers will be made shortly. These will be on the basis of the options appraisal papers and ongoing discussions on the proposals.
The team is driving forward the programme and will continue to do so through to a successful conclusion. Thank you again for all your contributions and for taking ownership and responsibly for this important joint government project.
Contact Us
The E-Planning Programme mailbox is fully operational & the address is:
Mailbox eplanning@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
E-Planning Programme team contact details are:
Avril Anderson avril.anderson@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Clare Inverarity clare.Inverarity@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Fiona Young fiona.young@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Graham Jones graham.jones@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Helen Byers helen.byers@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Lesley Smillie lesley.smillie@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Rhys Morgan rhys.morgan@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Susan Begg susan.begg@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Tom Moore tom.moore@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Liz Pringle
liz.pringle@scotland.gsi.gov.uk Juliette Mitchell Juliette.mitchell@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Recent/Upcoming Events
- 07/02/08 OAA Working Group Meeting ( WG Members Only)
- 08/02/08 OLP Evaluation Moderation Meeting (Evaluation Group Members Only)
- 18/02/08 OLP Working Group Meeting ( WG Members Only)
- 26/02/08 Programme Board Meeting (Board Members Only)
- 12/02/08 Development Managers Workshop (Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Centre)
- 13/02/08 All Staff Workshop (Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Centre)
- 19/02/08 Development Managers Workshop (Victoria Quay, Edinburgh)
- 20/02/08 All Staff Workshop ( COSLA, Edinburgh)
- 26/02/08 All Staff Workshop (Radisson Hotel, Glasgow)
- 27/02/08 Development Managers Workshop (The Park Hotel, Kilmarnock)
- 28/02/08 All Staff Workshop (The Park Hotel, Kilmarnock)
Invites will be sent via email with full details
Projects Status Update
Online Applications and Appeals
Rhys Morgan
Following the signing of contracts, the Programme Team and the newly appointed SAIC have been working hard to provide the foundations of the project defining technical specifications, installing data centre hardware, and developing the solution and necessary infrastructure that needs to be in place. The name of the service has now been agreed to be Scottish Planning Online, and this will become the new name for the project in subsequent correspondence following this newsletter. A series of business process workshops and change meetings have been undertaken throughout Scotland in the last few weeks to provide an overview of the business activities needed to support adoption of e-Planning. These workshops proved to be an invaluable exercise in understanding and documenting the local action plans, next key steps for the project and the approach for development, it also generated some really useful discussion and raised relevant considerations for the project moving forward, all of which are now being investigated.
We are continuing to work closely with SAIC in planning for the implementation of OAA and capturing the key dates for development. We published these on the 13 February to ensure everyone is clear of what is happening and when along with core information that will be required by the various staff members involved, so we can all schedule resource accordingly for the next set of activities such as development, implementation and training where partners will obviously be playing a vital role. The project is still aiming for a Go Live date of July 2008, however there will be a Ministerial launch of the site, which may mean the official public go live happens slightly after this date allowing partners to bed in the necessary changes in back office processes.
Online Planning Information Systems
Rhys Morgan
The final ITT was issued on 19 October and we received comprehensive responses from three suppliers Civica, IBM, and IDOX on 23 November. The evaluation panel reviewed and evaluated these proposals, and a moderation meeting was held on 11 December to discuss the evaluation panel's findings. A supplier presentation followed on 17 and 18 December after which the evaluation panel once again reconsidered their scoring, and met one final time to make a recommendation to the Board on who the preferred supplier should be. The evaluation panel agreed that IDOX should be the preferred bidder at this stage and the recommendation was approved by the Board. We are now entering into contractual discussions to finalise the principal agreements, perform site visits, seek the necessary assurances surrounding outstanding questions and populate the User Agreements for subsequent signature by the recipient partners. We have a meeting scheduled for the partners receiving the OPIS software on the 19 th February and we will be running through the next steps, key activities and timescales in respect of contract signature and it is important that you attend to ensure all partners are clear on the process moving forward. We have also issued out our responses to the comments and observations made on the draft user agreements, and hope to issue the new versions of the latter shortly.
For partners looking to receive hardware only, all the quotes have now been agreed, and hopefully orders have now been placed locally. Please ensure copies of the invoices are submitted to Scottish Government by end of March. Please contact us if this is not the case if you are partner down to receive only Hardware from the OPIS stream.
If you have any questions on either of these projects please contact Rhys Morgan, rhys.morgan@scotland.gsi.gov.uk, 0131 244 7358 - Mobile 07917 067 638
Online Local Plans
Tom Moore
Key Dates
Feb 8 th -OLP Evaluation Meeting
Feb18th - OLP Working Group
The Online Local Plans project has restarted and has received three bids to supply solutions and services to meet the OLP requirement. The bids are currently being assessed by the evaluation panel. The next stages in the procurement is the dialogue process in which we can challenge elements of the proposals and they can ask for clarifications in terms of our requirements. These workshops, with the suppliers and sub-sets of the evaluation panel, are occurring in late February and early March. It also gives us an opportunity to discuss potential risks and issues with the project moving forward.
The Online Local Plans best practice documentation is now available on SharePoint. This is a working document that will be re-visited and amended as the dialogue process continues.
Expert System
Liz Pringle
The Expert Systems Working Group met on 23 January to review the Delivery Options Appraisal paper. After a full discussion on the benefits and dis-benefits of each option, the Working Group recommended that a stock take exercise is required of constraints data needed to drive an expert system. An understanding of the data readiness within the authorities is needed to inform the decision on options appraisal. A very short survey is being distributed outlining the constraints data needed to drive an expert system and asking whether your authority holds the data in GIS/database format currently or intends to collect over the coming year. I anticipate that you will already have much of the information to hand so it will hopefully not be onerous. Please get in touch if you have any queries. A decision on the way forward with the project will follow shortly.
e-Consultation
Liz Pringle
Partner comments on the eConsultation Standards document have been reviewed, documented and where appropriate actioned. The revisions to the outline standards ( i.e. only the standards themselves and not the accompanying standards document) were discussed at the eConsultation Working Group meeting on 30 January and a number of amendments agreed. The deadline for comments on these revisions is 7 th February and sign-off of the standards will be middle of February in order to feed into the OPIS final contract. Subsequent re-working of the Standards document itself will then take place to improve the clarity and purpose of the document.
The eConsultation Triggers document is being reviewed by Planning Directorate colleagues to provide input on legislative compliance. There remains some work to be done on the document to outline the basis for consultations to be triggered. Once drafted by the Working Group the document will be distributed to all partners for review.
Avril Anderson
Readiness Survey: Many thanks to Partners for completing and returning the Business, Technical and Organisational Rreadiness survey. The technical data provided by Partners has now been collated and passed to the OAA supplier.
As part of the survey partners were asked to submit any questions they had for the Programme team and / or supplier. These are now in the process of being collated and added to the FAQ on Share Point.
Action Planning: To provide support for Partners with their local action planning, the Change Management team have been out to various Authorities throughout Scotland facilitating workshops and providing support to project managers as they work with their teams to identify activities for their local plans. The slides and templates used at these workshops will be available to all partners shortly on Share Point.
OAA Functional Demonstration Workshops: Throughout February the Change Management team will be running OAA Functional Demonstration workshops at various locations throughout Scotland for project managers and planning staff. The OAA supplier SAIC will be demonstrate the "Journey of an e form" to enable Authorities to gain an understanding of the impact OAA will have on their current business processes.
Development Managers Road shows: These will also run through the month of February to provide Development Managers Heads of Service with an understanding of the strategic impact of the e- Planning Programme.
If you have any questions or would like any assistance with change management issues please contact Avril Anderson - e mail avril.anderson@scotland.gsi.gov.uk, 0131 244 5902
Benefits Realisation
Helen Byers
The first of the Benefits workshops was held on Tuesday 22 January in Falkirk. The workshop was a half day workshop and looked at the required measures to be taken for OAA throughout the realisation process and the logistics for recording the measured benefits. Now that the 3 Planning Authorities have been selected and have agreed to measure the average benefits for OAA, the remaining authorities within the OAA project will be able to follow the benefit progress being made through communication from the Scottish Government Benefits Manager.
The OPIS benefits workshop is being held in Fife on Monday 25 February for the 3 partners responsible for measuring the average benefit realisation figures for the OPIS Project (Fife, Inverclyde & Moray). The assumptions surrounding the calculation of OPIS benefits and the baselines used are contained in the OPIS assumptions paper, this has been issued to the 3 volunteer authorities and is also available for all with Sharepoint access to view.
3 Volunteer Partners are still required to take responsibility for measuring the benefits for each of the remaining 3 projects - OLP, Expert Systems and E-Consultation. If you are keen for your authority to be involved in the realisation process, please contact Helen Byers helen.byers@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
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