Tender

Digital Contingent Labour Framework

  • THAMES WATER UTILITIES LIMITED

UK4: Tender notice - Procurement Act 2023 - view information about notice types

Notice identifier: 2026/S 000-007761

Procurement identifier (OCID): ocds-h6vhtk-06016e (view related notices)

Published 28 January 2026, 4:55pm



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)

  • £0 excluding VAT
  • £0 including VAT

Above the relevant threshold

Contract dates (estimated)

  • 13 May 2026 to 12 May 2030
  • Possible extension to 12 May 2034
  • 8 years

Description of possible extension:

Thames Water retains the right to extend the framework in whole or in part for up to four one year extensions.

Options

The right to additional purchases while the contract is valid.

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.

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)

Lot 1. Project management services

Description

This Lot covers the provision of professional Project Management in the Digital function at Thames Water. Project managers lead one or multiple projects depending on its size and scale of complexity.

A project manager is a professional responsible for planning, organising, 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.

Lot value (estimated)

  • £0 excluding VAT
  • £0 including VAT

Framework lot values may be shared with other lots

Same for all lots

CPV classifications, contract locations, contract dates and options are shown in the Scope section, because they are the same for all lots.


Lot 2. Business Analyst Services

Description

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.

Lot value (estimated)

  • £0 excluding VAT
  • £0 including VAT

Framework lot values may be shared with other lots

Same for all lots

CPV classifications, contract locations, contract dates and options are shown in the Scope section, because they are the same for all lots.


Lot 3. Change Management Services

Description

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.

Lot value (estimated)

  • £0 excluding VAT
  • £0 including VAT

Framework lot values may be shared with other lots

Same for all lots

CPV classifications, contract locations, contract dates and options are shown in the Scope section, because they are the same for all lots.


Lot 4. Trainers

Description

Training capability is integral to the success of our transformational projects and programmes - ensuring our people have the confidence, skills, and behaviours needed to adopt new technology and ways of working. The role of training is to help builds Digital confidence and competence across new systems, tools and processes helping to increase adoption, reduce operational risk and enable wider cultural and behavioural change.

Specifically, the training capability will understand and determine training needs; produce training interventions through working with subject matter experts; organise, manage, plan and deliver training interventions; assess and evaluate training effectiveness and partner across all levels impacted by the change (whether leadership, change champions or front line teams) to repeatable, best practice standards, methods and tools. The training capability will work alongside change and communications specialists to ensure a mature, standardised and integrated practice.

Effective training provides users with the knowledge, skills and confidence required to adopt new approaches and increases the likelihood of a smooth roll out and higher levels of satisfaction

Lot value (estimated)

  • £0 excluding VAT
  • £0 including VAT

Framework lot values may be shared with other lots

Same for all lots

CPV classifications, contract locations, contract dates and options are shown in the Scope section, because they are the same for all lots.


Framework

Maximum number of suppliers

Unlimited

Maximum percentage fee charged to suppliers

0%

Framework operation description

Preferred supplier in each lot with agreed terms, rates and rebate structure in place

Award method when using the framework

Either with or without competition

Contracting authorities that may use the framework

Establishing party only


Participation

Particular suitability

Lot 1. Project management services

Lot 2. Business Analyst Services

Lot 3. Change Management Services

Lot 4. Trainers

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME)


Submission

Enquiry deadline

17 February 2026, 5:00pm

Submission type

Requests to participate

Deadline for requests to participate

24 February 2026, 10:00am

Submission address and any special instructions

If you would like to gain access to the PSQ documents, please fill out the details within this form

https://forms.office.com/e/YAWD6HJ84K

Tenders may be submitted electronically

Yes

Languages that may be used for submission

English

Award decision date (estimated)

1 May 2026

Recurring procurement

Publication date of next tender notice (estimated): 1 December 2034


Award criteria

This table contains award criteria for this lot
Name Description Type Weighting
Presentations

Shortlisted bidders will be invited to present to Thames which will be evaluated by a panel

Quality 40%
Commercial

Pricing for each lot will be reviewed for the four year initial term

Price 35%
Technical

We will be scoring your written submission including key areas reviewing your ability to deliver the services, value adding services, talent management and transition

Quality 25%

Other information

Conflicts assessment prepared/revised

Yes


Procedure

Procedure type

Competitive flexible procedure

Special regime

Utilities

Competitive flexible procedure description

PSQ followed by ITN, shortlisting further based on written submissions to presentations and award


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