Building standards - digital competency assessment system: options appraisal

4. Assessment Criteria

4.1 Primary Criteria

1. The primary criteria are those that will have the greatest impact on the success of the project or would have significant detrimental impact on project stakeholders if they were not met.

• Alignment with draft user requirements specified in Appendix 10.1 – The chosen solution should align well with the draft user requirements identified during engagements with stakeholders
• Cost – The chosen solution should represent good value for money
• Security – The chosen solution should meet all security standards required by stakeholders.

4.2 Secondary Criteria

1. The secondary criteria are those criteria that are less likely to cause overall failure of the project if they are not met but are still important in order to achieve the best outcome.

• Timescales – The chosen solution should be possible to implement within a reasonable timescale
• Extensibility – The chosen solution should be extensible in the following ways:
  • It should be possible to edit existing competencies
  • It should be possible to add new competencies and groups of competencies
  • The solution should provide the flexibility to extend functionality to meet future requirements
• Ease of maintenance – The chosen solution should be easy to maintain by administrators
• Interoperability – The chosen solution should be able to integrate with other systems, including:
  • LABSS Virtual Learning Environment
  • Local Authority Learning and Development Systems
• Reuse of Services – The chosen solution should reuse existing services and resources that are available to Building Standards Division, LABSS and/or the Building Standards Hub

4.3 Market Assessment

1. A full market assessment was done on available platforms and technologies that could be used to provide a Digital CAS solution. We identified five suitable options and further assessed the advantages and disadvantages of each one. The five options are:

• Amend existing CAS
• Leverage VLE functionality
• Bespoke .Net solution
• Low-code Power Platform
• Purchase an existing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product