Development of Spreadsheet Model QA Guidance and Training Material

Ofwat has limited dedicated internal modelling resource, and this is currently mainly focussed on the development of the financial model for PR19. The objective of this contract is therefore to use external support to develop detailed, Ofwat specific, guidance on model quality assurance. The scope of the work is to develop:

• QA approach - documentation describing an Ofwat-specific quality assurance approach that reflects best practice, including where relevant, guidance from the Aqua Book, IEEE 1028, academic research and industry. • Scoring spreadsheet - an easy to use spreadsheet tool that can be used to quantitatively assess the quality of spreadsheet model. Ofwat has a copy of a spreadsheet scoring system originally developed by DECC and has started to adapt this to our needs. These will be shared with the successful bidder. • Quality assurance training material - Ofwat plans to deliver some in-house training courses on quality assurance. These are expected to be circa 3.5 hours long. Course material is required to that can be used to deliver these training courses.

It should be noted that the successful contractor will not be required to deliver any of the training courses - these will be delivered by Ofwat staff after the contract has finished.

The work needs to be delivered quickly so that training courses can be delivered in April to July 2017.