Attachment A - Background Goals and Scope.docx

DESE Website Modernization - BACKGROUND, GOALS, AND SCOPE

BACKGROUND

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (“DESE”) oversees public K–12 education and public adult education across the Commonwealth, working with school districts, educators, and communities to set standards, provide guidance, and support high-quality teaching and learning. Guided by the state’s educational vision, DESE promotes schools and classrooms that are antiracist, inclusive, multilingual, and multicultural, where every student feels a sense of belonging and is supported to achieve their full potential. The department focuses on ensuring equitable access to learning opportunities, strengthening educator practice, and helping districts create environments that value and affirm students’ identities, experiences, and families, so that all learners, especially those historically underserved, can thrive academically, socially, and civically.

The DESE website has evolved over many years into one of the Commonwealth's largest public-facing information resources, resulting in a substantial volume of content and increasing complexity in its organization, maintenance, and governance. As part of ongoing content governance efforts, DESE and the Executive Office of Education Information Technology (“EOE IT”) completed a Web Accessibility and Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial (“ROT”) content analysis that reduced downloadable documents from approximately 30,000 to 12,000 and eliminated obsolete webpages, broken links, and outdated files. The current website consists of approximately 3,000 webpages and 12,000 downloadable documents and is supported by approximately 54 Content Providers across DESE who submit content publishing requests through the EOE Web Services team.

This RFQ solicits services exclusively for the DESE Website Modernization project. The project is an initiative under the Commonwealth's broader K–12 Public Information Modernization Program, which also includes the School and District Profiles and Report Cards Modernization project.

As part of this initiative, DESE engaged Health Resources in Action (“HRiA”) and the Collaborative Parent Leadership Action Network (“CPLAN”) to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the current website and identify opportunities to improve usability, accessibility, information architecture, content governance, search, multilingual access, and overall user experience. DESE has adopted the findings and recommendations of the HRiA CPLAN-DESE Website Assessment Report as the strategic foundation for the DESE Website Modernization initiative.

This Request for Quotes (“RFQ”) represents the next phase of the DESE Website Modernization initiative and seeks qualified Bidders to provide professional services for procurement service phases:

1. Business Requirements Refinement

2. Solution Architecture Design

3. Implementation with Prototype

4. Data and Content Migration

The selected Bidder(s) shall build upon the recommendations of the Attachment M - HRiA CPLAN-DESE Website Assessment Report and Attachment C - Current Process Documentation to validate and refine business requirements with DESE Stakeholders (internal and external), develop the future-state requirements, create solution architecture and design, implement the approved solution with a prototype, and perform the migration of website content and data in accordance with the approved business and technical requirements. Bidders shall provide separate pricing for each procurement service phase.

To support this effort, EOE IT has documented the current state of website content publishing, including existing workflows, roles, and responsibilities, and has identified opportunities for process improvement. This documentation, together with the HRiA CPLAN-DESE Website Assessment Report, will serve as foundational input for the Bidder’s analysis, design, implementation planning, and, if awarded, implementation requirements.

The following table summarizes key opportunities identified during the current-state assessment that the Vendor shall consider during the Business Requirements Refinement phase.

GOALS

Project Goals This initiative is focused on delivering a modernized DESE website that improves how constituents find, access, and use DESE information and enables DESE to manage its web presence more effectively and sustainably. The project shall achieve the following goals:

· Deliver an accessible, mobile-ready, and multilingual, digital experience, including required remediation of all applicable webpages and downloadable files identified within project scope.

· Organize content around constituents’ needs, common tasks, and audience groups rather than DESE's organizational structure.

· Improve the overall user experience and content discoverability through intuitive navigation, audience-centered information architecture, improved search taxonomy, and metadata.

· Implement consistent user experience utilizing the Massachusetts Design System.

· Address current pain points through improved business processes, content governance, publishing workflows, and content lifecycle management.

· Comply with Enterprise Digital Accessibility Statement | Mass.gov, Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) Title II Digital Accessibility Information | Mass.gov, and applicable Commonwealth accessibility standards.

· Prioritize agency self-service and maintainability so trained and authorized DESE personnel can efficiently manage, update, and publish routine content with minimal reliance on the EOE Web Services Team. This will allow the EOE Web Services Team to focus on higher-value web services, including accessibility, user experience, information architecture, standards, and complex digital needs.

· Develop a solution architecture design approved and signed off by EOE IT.

· Implement the solution architecture design based on the approved design above.

· The solution should support future AI use cases through structured content, metadata, API-first design, semantic search, and scalable information architecture.

· Support future innovation through structured content, standards-based APIs, semantic metadata, and an extensible architecture capable of supporting future AI-enabled capabilities.

SCOPE OF WORK

The selected Bidder shall provide professional services for one or more of the following procurement service phases. Bidders may submit proposals for any individual phase or for all phases and shall provide separate pricing for each phase proposed.

Project Timebox

Business Requirements Refinement Phase The Bidder shall review, validate, refine, and document DESE's business requirements to establish a complete and approved baseline for the DESE Website Modernization Services. At a high level, the scope includes:

· Review and validate the documented business and technical requirements.

· Conduct stakeholder workshops, interviews, and business process validation.

· Refine business, functional, non-functional, accessibility, and governance requirements.

· Validate user personas, audience groups, user journeys, and business processes.

· Provide a content model, user-centric taxonomy, and site navigation plan

· Identify business gaps, dependencies, assumptions, risks, and implementation considerations.

· Deliver an approved Business Requirements Specification to support solution design and implementation.

· Define the future-state content publishing and governance model, including self-service capabilities, roles, responsibilities, approvals, and the future role of the EOE Web Services Team.

· Update the Inventory to reflect each item’s disposition such as migrate as-is, migrate with transformation, rewrite, consolidate, archive, or delete.

Solution Architecture, Design, and Implementation Phases with Prototype The Bidder shall design, develop, implement, and prototype the approved solution based on the validated business and technical requirements. At a high level, the scope includes:

· Develop the future-state user experience, information architecture, navigation, visual design using Figma or similar tools, and solution architecture.

· Configure and implement the Drupal platform utilizing the Massachusetts Design System and Commonwealth technology standards.

· Development required integration, workflows, security, accessibility, search, taxonomy, metadata, multilingual capabilities, and AI-ready architecture.

· Perform solution configuration, custom development where approved, system testing, user acceptance testing, training, and prototype implementation.

· Produce implementation-ready technical documentation, operational documentation, and knowledge transfer materials.

Data and Content Migration Phase The Bidder shall develop and execute the strategy for migrating website content and supporting data into the new platform. At a high level, the scope includes:

· Develop the migration strategy, migration plan, and migration schedule.

· Prepare, validate, organize, transform, and migrate approved website content and associated data.

· Perform migration validation, quality assurance, accessibility verification, and production readiness activities.

· Support production deployment, stabilization, post-migration validation, and transition to ongoing operations.

· Optimize migrated content to align with the approved information architecture, taxonomy, navigation, and search strategy.

EXPECTED DELIVERABLES

Business Requirements Refinement Report The Vendor shall review and refine DESE’s documented business requirements with DESE stakeholders, incorporating findings from the business process review to establish an approved and traceable baseline for the next phase, with formal sign-off.

· Approved Business Requirements Specification

· Functional and Non-functional Requirements

· User Personas/ Journey Maps/ Use Cases

· Current and Future State Business Process Documentation

· Business Rules and Gap Analysis

· Future-state content publishing and governance model

· Requirements Traceability Matrix

· Stakeholders Review and Sign Off Solution Architecture and Design The Vendor should produce the design and technical deliverables necessary to support successful implementation of the modernized DESE website.

· Recommended Website Vision and Design Principles

· Information Architecture and Sitemap

· Navigation Model and Taxonomy

· Wireframes and Interactive Prototypes

· Designs for all page types using the Massachusetts Design System with a mapping of all current pages to page types, direction on content changes such as rewording or new images needed, and a Design Playbook

· Drupal Solution Architecture

· Technical Design Specifications

· Search, Metadata, and Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) Strategy

· Content Governance, End User Activity Analytics, and Trend Reporting

· AI Readiness Design

· Solution Architecture Design Sign Off with EOE IT Implementation with Prototype The Vendor shall implement and validate the approved solution and provide implementation, review, and knowledge transfer deliverables.

· Configured, Tested, and Production-Ready Implementation

· Code Review and Sign-off with EOE IT

· Training and Knowledge Transfer, and Documentation Data and Content Migration The Vendor shall plan, execute, and validate the migration of approved content and data to the modernized platform.

· Content and Data Migration Strategy (See Attachment F - Site Inventory and App Inventory)

· Migration Execution Plan

· Migrated and Validated Website Content and Data in the Production Environment

· Migration Validation and Quality Assurance Results

· Production Migration Documentation

· Post-Migration Validation Report and Sign-Off

· Operational Transition Documentation Accessibility Audit and Testing Report

· Accessibility Conformance Report (“ACR”) based on Completed Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (“VPAT”). See Attachment E – Accessibility Requirements.

Future-State Vision The selected Vendor shall work collaboratively with DESE and EOE to transform the current website into a modern, user-centered digital platform that improves how information is organized, managed, discovered, and delivered and supports a governed, sustainable content operating model. Building upon the current-state documentation, business and technical requirements, the Vendor shall refine requirements, design and implement the solution, validate key design and technical decisions through iterative review with DESE and EOE, and migrate approved content and data to support an intuitive, accessible, searchable, and sustainable website aligned with DESE’s business objectives and Commonwealth standards.

The Vendor shall leverage the business requirements contained in Attachment B – Business Requirements, Attachment C – Current Process Documentation and the technical requirements contained in Attachment D – Technical Requirements as the baseline for developing the proposed solution. Bidders shall review these attachments in their entirety and describe how their proposed approach aligns with and satisfies the stated requirements.

AGILE PROCESS

The Bidder shall use an iterative Agile delivery methodology that promotes collaboration, transparency, and incremental delivery of working solutions. Throughout the project, the Bidder shall conduct regular planning, review, and demonstration sessions with EOE and DESE to validate progress, gather feedback, and obtain approval before proceeding to subsequent phases or major deliverables. All deliverables shall be subject to review and written acceptance by EOE and DESE and must meet the agreed-upon business, technical, security, accessibility, and quality requirements before being considered complete.