P&RC Minutes 27 September 2019

Minutes of the Special Meeting of the Cardiff University Policy and Resources Committee held on Friday 27 September 2019 in room 0.51, Main Building and by teleconference at 14:00.

Present: Professor Stuart Palmer (Chair via teleconference), Dr Carol Bell (via teleconference), Mr Tomos Evans, Professor Karen Holford (via teleconference), Ms Jan Juillerat (via teleconference), and Dr Steven Luke (via teleconference).

Attendees:        Ms Eileen Brandreth, Ms Deborah Collins (Secretary), Ms Katy Dale (Minutes), Mr David Edwards, and Mr Rob Williams.

Apologies:        Professor Colin Riordan, Ms Tania Deitch, Mr Alastair Gibbons, and Ms Jackie Yip.

Welcome

The Chair welcomed all to the meeting.

585 Network Refresh Business Case

Received and considered paper 19/22B, ‘Network Refresh’. Mr David Edwards introduced the paper.

Noted

585.1 that a full business case had been approved in 2016 for a full refresh of the network (to include the core, edge and wi-fi) due to equipment coming to the end of its life and no longer being supported by the manufacturer;

585.2 that the original business case had a programme of 5 years and a cost of £17.3M;

585.3 that there had been a lot of positive responses to the tender and 4 bidders had submitted a tender at the final tender stage;

585.4 that the tender process had involved Blake Morgan for legal advice and Gartner and 4C Strategy as external consultants;

585.5 that during the tender process, it had become clear there was a need to include security for 24/7 and out of hours provision; this had added a cost of £1.44m;

585.6 that that addition of this provision and an increase to a 7-year process increased the total cost to £21.55m;

585.7 that the name of the chosen bidder could not be released until after Council approval and so this information was highly commercially sensitive;

585.8 that the chosen bidder was a local company, which provide a benefit in terms of response times and aligning with the university’s civic mission;

585.9 that the team had carried out a financial stress test as part of the PQQ and this would be repeated as part of due diligence; it was felt the chosen bidder is now in a stronger position than during the PQQ stage;

585.10 that the chosen bidder had undertaken similar projects before;

585.11 that the team would ensure any staff development or secondment opportunities would be carefully contracted to ensure clarity on staffing roles and responsibilities;

585.12 that the £2.8M for LAN room contingency had been included in the overall costs provided;

585.13 that the contingency costs had been calculated using comparative data and in discussions with the University’s Finance team; the value of contingency had reduced since the original business case due to fixed costs within the contract and progression with early designs;

585.14 that an implementation and rollout programme would be finalised following the initial work on the 10 buildings identified;

585.15 that the Chief Financial Officer was very supportive of the proposals in the paper and believed it to be a worthwhile investment.

Resolved

585.16 to recommend to Council approval of: