Scope
Reference
FA2433
Description
Business Analysis:
Business Analysis at Thames Water drives successful change by analysing business situations, assessing feasibility, and defining clear requirements across people, processes, and technology. Acting as a bridge between stakeholders and delivery teams, it enables the delivery of solutions that achieve strategic outcomes and deliver key business benefits. Additionally, Business Analysis fosters process improvement, strengthens stakeholder engagement, and ensures governance compliance through high-quality analysis artifacts and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Key Roles looking for in this tender:
Junior Business Analyst (Gartner level 1) - works on small tasks or parts of a project, has a basic understanding of BA tools and techniques, good communication, eagerness to learn. Responsible for low-complexity tasks under close supervision and has limited decision-making authority. Document basic processes and simple requirements and create simple reports. Support more experienced BAs in workshops and stakeholder meetings.
Business Analyst (Gartner level 2) - Works on clearly defined tasks within projects, handles moderately complex analysis, usually within a single business area, works under direction of Senior or Lead Business Analyst; receives guidance on priorities and methods. Limited to project-level stakeholders.
Senior Business Analyst (Gartner level 3) - Leads BA activities across multiple projects or programmes (including strategic analysis); often covers multiple business domains, deals with high ambiguity and complex business situations, sets BA approach and advises others. Facilitates decision-making at senior stakeholder level. Coaches and mentors other BAs. Activities as per the BA above, whilst demonstrating a higher level of responsibility, complexity, autonomy, and influence.
Lead Business Analyst (Gartner level 4) - Focused on Strategic alignment and team leadership. Leads BA Activities across Enterprise-level initiatives, multiple projects, and strategic programs. Align requirements with strategic and technical roadmaps. Define BA standards, governance, and best practices. Manage and coach BA team members. Act as key liaison between business and technology leadership.
Project Management:
Project Management in the Digital function at Thames Water leads one or multiple projects depending on its size and scale of complexity. A project manager is a professional responsible for planning, organizing, and overseeing the execution of a project from start to finish following the Thames Water delivery framework/methodology. They ensure the project meets its goals within the agreed scope, schedule, budget, quality standards, and resources.
Key Roles:
Project Support Office role (Gartner Level 1): A Project Support Office provides the administrative, logistical, and coordination backbone that keeps programmes/ projects running smoothly. It supports project managers, teams, and sometimes entire programmes by ensuring consistency, documentation control, reporting, and governance.
Junior Project Manager (Gartner Level 1 or experience in supporting / PMO roles): A junior project manager assists with planning, execution, and monitoring of projects to ensure they are delivered on time, within budget, and to the required quality standards. Works as part of a project team / leads on a small workstream as part of a larger project.
Project Manager (Gartner Level 3): responsible for planning, executing, and delivering projects on time, within scope, and within budget. They coordinate teams, manage risks, and ensure that project outcomes align with organisational goals. Leads the day to day management of a project, ensuring all activities are organised, monitored, and delivered to the required quality standards
Senior Project Manager (Gartner Level 4): leads complex, high value projects and often oversees multiple project teams. They are responsible for ensuring delivery within agreed scope, time, cost, and quality constraints while aligning outcomes with strategic business objectives. Provides leadership, direction, and oversight for large or multiple projects, ensuring they meet organisational goals and deliver measurable results. They act as the primary point of accountability for senior stakeholders.
Programme Manager (Gartner Level 5): oversees and coordinates multiple related projects to ensure they collectively deliver strategic organisational outcomes. They provide leadership, governance, and direction across a programme of work, ensuring alignment with business goals and successful delivery of benefits. Act as the primary point of accountability into senior stakeholders / Executives.
Business Change:
Business Change function helps to support and embed change when implementing technology change projects. It ensures effective transitioning of our business and stakeholders to a desired future state (such as adopting new systems / new approaches) to create value and integrate into business operations.
The function includes taking a structured approach to managing change; ensuring awareness, willingness, capability and training to adopt change; understanding and tracking change impact; managing risks related to change implementation (including resistance and adoption barriers); delivering change interventions to office-based and field-based operational colleagues.
Key Roles:
Change Lead (Gartner level 3)
Own and lead the change impact assessment for the project / programme
Design, deploy and manage key change management deliverables such as the change plan, training needs assessment, communications plan and change readiness assessment
Identify and collaborate with Change Analysts (and Champions within each business area), building a strong internal network for change
Build and maintain strong relationships with external and internal teams to ensure alignment on goals and solicit feedback from stakeholders involved and impacted by the change
Undertake targeted pre-change activities including stakeholder mapping, change impact and communication, engagement and training plans
Undertake change transition activities (e.g. user acceptance)
Identify and collaborate with sponsor, programme manager, project team to manage risks (threats and opportunities) and issues regarding ability to adopt new ways of working
Work closely with the change areas to make sure we map out the change impact and dependencies
Manage change to scope, time and budget within agreed tolerances or escalate changes accordingly
Senior Change Analyst (Gartner level 2)
Support more complex change and engagement activity per the needs of the Change Strategy and Change Plan
Prepares for and co-ordinates change workshops
Co-ordinates communications and engagements in delivery of the Change and Communications Plans
Co-ordinates training requirements
Provides support in terms of monitoring, measuring and reporting change
Tracks and assures change benefits
All other activities per the Change Analyst (below)
Change Analyst (Gartner level 1)
Supports the Change Lead to conduct change impact assessments and stakeholder analysis
Supports the development and delivery of the change strategy, change plan and activities
Creates and delivers essential change communications and training materials
Understands initial readiness for change across impacted teams
Tracks change readiness and adoption metrics
Facilitates workshops and feedback sessions where interventions are needed
Works closely with the impacted teams to ensure the change impact is mapped and dependencies highlighted
Identifies and escalates risks and issues that would impact the adoption of the change
Communications Lead (Gartner level 3)
Provides change narrative for communications and engagements
Uses the Change Plan, Communications Plan and Communication Framework to develop a compelling change narrative for regular communications and engagements related to the project or programme
Monitors and measure the effectiveness of the communications and rapidly evolve the communication/engagement approaches
Delivers change communications interventions - e.g. briefings, newsletters, webinars, internal social media, workshops
Interfaces with other Change and Communications roles to enable alignment
Creates content to embed key messaging at programme and portfolio level aligned to overall company Purpose, Priorities and Values
Training Lead (Gartner level 3)
Understands training needs through stakeholder engagement, role analysis, and impact assessments (provided by Change Lead and Change Analysts)
Owns the relationship and works closely with Thames Water Learning & Development team
Drives the production of the training elements - per the training needs analysis - to meet the programme or project timescales
Ensures quality and effectiveness of learning and alignment with standards
Engages with the business to develop and agree training plans
Monitors training uptake and works with business stakeholders to ensure targets met
Identifies additional training needs (after go-live) and provides suitable training solutions
Works with subject matter experts (SMEs) and vendors to create training materials (e.g. eLearning, videos, user guides, classroom courses)
Organises, manages and supports the delivery of training sessions
Gathers feedback and continuously improves training effectiveness
Trainer (Gartner level 2)
Develops and designs face to face training in order to meet agreed learning objectives
Prepares training content to ensure maximum training effectiveness
Deeply understands the training content (ie 'the solution') and the business process / context
Personally delivers training to end users - ensuring the training meets learning objectives
Evaluates the training delivered and follows up to understand training effectiveness
Commercial tool
Establishes a framework
Total value (estimated)
- £35,000,000 excluding VAT
- £42,000,000 including VAT
Above the relevant threshold
Contract dates (estimated)
- 13 April 2026 to 12 April 2030
- Possible extension to 12 April 2034
- 8 years
Main procurement category
Services
CPV classifications
- 72220000 - Systems and technical consultancy services
- 72240000 - Systems analysis and programming services
- 72250000 - System and support services
- 72260000 - Software-related services
- 72300000 - Data services
- 75112000 - Administrative services for business operations
- 79410000 - Business and management consultancy services
Contract locations
- UKI - London
- UKJ - South East (England)
Engagement
Engagement deadline
20 January 2026
Engagement process description
Include information on the scope of the engagement, the locations and dates of any events, and instructions for submitting expressions of interest and clarification questions.
The PSQ stage is expected to be issued via SAP Ariba from mid-January to mid-February. It will be open to all and used to shortlist up to 6 suppliers for each lot.
The lots will be broken to Project management, Business Change and Business Analysis functions.
The shortlisted suppliers will be invited to ITN stage which will which is expected to be held from the end of February to the end of March. Written responses will be used to shortlist to top three suppliers who will invited to present their solutions at Clearwater Court in Reading in early April. These presentations will be scored and used in the final evaluation along with commercial submissions and the ITN written responses to award each Lot to a preferred partner.
The initial period of the contract will be four (4) years. Thames Water may then elect at its sole discretion to extend this Agreement in whole or in part by 4 further periods of one year each (or for any alternative periods) to taking it to a total of 8 years from the Effective Date.
Participation
Particular suitability
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME)
Submission
Publication date of tender notice (estimated)
20 January 2026
Procedure
Special regime
Utilities
Contracting authority
THAMES WATER UTILITIES LIMITED
- Companies House: 02366661
- Public Procurement Organisation Number: PNQQ-4647-DTCV
Clearwater Court
Reading
RG1 8DB
United Kingdom
Region: UKJ11 - Berkshire
Organisation type: Private utility