Working with contractors or third parties
You need to have a range of specific service delivery team roles in place to design, build and run your digital service.
If you don’t have these in your team or available to it, you may need to hire third parties or contractors.
You should only work with contractors or suppliers who are prepared to pass on their expertise.
Identify the skills you need
When you have an idea of the service you’re going to create, talk to your team about the skills you need.
Before you recruit anyone from outside the Civil Service, see if you have any team members who can develop these skills.
Choosing contractors or third parties
It’s important to only buy the skills you need and not to lock your service into a long contract with a fixed cost.
When you’re considering a person or company to work with, look for evidence of:
- a proven track record of using agile methods to design, build and deliver projects
- the ability and commitment to share knowledge with permanent staff in the delivery team
- how they’ll deliver in an agile way, even if your department traditionally uses waterfall or PRINCE2 delivery methods
- how they define, measure and maintain good quality products and services
- their ability to comply with relevant cyber security obligations
You can use the Digital Marketplace to buy a service or find a skill. The Digital Marketplace buyers’ guide explains how to do this.
You can also use the Digital Training and Support buyers’ guide if you need to buy a service or find a skill to help you provide assisted digital support.
Products and services in the Digital Marketplace have not been security assured. Learn about managing third-party product security risks.
After you recruit contractors
To limit the potential of cyber security vulnerabilities, contractors and suppliers should only be given necessary access to the information and systems they need to do their job and contribute to the work of the team.
Appropriate processes should be in place to remove access when it is no longer required.
Treat contractors and permanent staff as equal team members. This will make it easier to establish a shared agile culture, with more informal learning and fewer communication overheads.
Transferring knowledge
You must make sure you have a plan to pass knowledge from contractors to the rest of your team. This is particularly important when you move from one phase to another, or if you change supplier.
To make sure knowledge transfer happens, you could do things like:
- encourage pairing: you might need to adjust people’s workloads so they’ve got time to do this
- organise sessions for contractors to share their knowledge or experiences
- make sure any documentation is in a good state
Related guides
You may also find the following guides useful:
- Last update:
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Integrated guidance on Managing third-party product security risks.
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Updated so it emphasises the importance of integrating contractors with the team rather than having everyone work in a single, shared space.
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Added examples of how teams can transfer knowledge from contractors
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Added link to 'Digital Marketplace buyers’ guide'.
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Guidance first published