The NSW Department of Housing, Planning and Infrastructure (DHPI) has gone out to market seeking a tech supplier to support the upgrade of its critical software platform, Pega.

The department said its NSW Planning Portal was one of the largest user bases of Pega in Australia and that the software upgrade would assist the department to better meet NSW housing targets.

The Request for proposal (RFP) also outlined several requirements across both functional and non-functional areas, including the core platform upgrade, enhancing overall performance and modernising the user interface.

“Pega is the core business process management platform supporting both the Major Projects and Planning Portal,” the tender documents said.

“It has been extensively customised to meet the functional requirements of planning policies, serving as the backbone for managing workflows, processes, and approvals across various departments, Councils, government agencies, businesses, and end users.

“In addition, Pega is the primary platform for customer service operations, facilitating the logging, tracking, and resolution of inquiries related to major projects and the planning portal.”

The tender documents also said the potential supplier would have to develop a “comprehensive upgrade plan” to transition from Pega 8.6 to the target version of either the latest or one below (N-1).

The requirements also include work related to auditing the current codebase to identify legacy or outdated features that can be updated or removed; seamlessly migrating all current processes, data and documents; performing tests and quality assurance checks; enhancing the user interface of the platform once updated; and ensuring stakeholder communication across all areas of the project is conducted.

The contract stipulates a proposed commencement date of 21 November for four months, with the option to extend the project time by a further four months.

The tender is expected to close to new applications on 1 November.