Our role
Wrote the specification, ran the evaluation, supervised the delivery — and did not bid on the build.
The brief
Three national websites, one merged institution, and a public that could not find anything.
Jordan’s Public Security Directorate had absorbed the Civil Defence and the Gendarmerie. The institution had merged; its public presence had not. Three separate websites continued to run, each with its own structure, its own content, and its own answer to the question of where a citizen should look for a service, a phone number, or an emergency contact.
For a police service, that is not a communications inconvenience. The website is where the public reaches the institution when it needs to — to find a directorate, submit a complaint, locate a station, or read a safety message. It also carries the harder work: after a merger, the site is one of the few places the public forms a view of what the new institution actually is.
The work sat inside a wider program strengthening police and community relations, funded by the Kingdom of the Netherlands and delivered by Siren Associates with the PSD. Which meant the rebuild was not only a technical procurement. It was a donor-funded procurement inside a security institution, and it had to be defensible at every step.
What we did
Specified it, tendered it, then held the vendor to what was written.
ISEET was the technical authority across the whole cycle — before the tender, through selection, and until launch. What ISEET did not do was bid.
01 / Specify
Wrote the requirement in enough detail to be enforceable
The scope of work defined what the merged site had to do rather than what it should look like: a content lifecycle of authoring, review, approval and publishing; a directorate model where each department carries its own structure and navigation; a form builder; a phone directory with geolocation; polling and questionnaire components; galleries; a live news ticker; bilingual Arabic and English throughout; and accessibility provisions — text-to-speech, font resizing, contrast control — reportable per feature. The technical requirements went further than most public tenders manage: security to ISO 27001 and 27002 and the OWASP Top 10 with test plans as deliverables, W3C validation, a defined role model, audit logging of every change with before and after values, and hosting at the National Information Technology Center with architecture, sizing and licensing all priced in the bid. One clause matters more than it appears to — no ready-made theme or template. That is the difference between a site that performs and one that carries a purchased theme’s weight for a decade.
02 / Tender
Ran an open procurement that could survive scrutiny
ISEET prepared the full dossier — invitation, instructions to tenderers, scope of work and technical specifications, proposed site structure, draft supply contract and special conditions, and the evaluation grid. Sealed offers, a published deadline, and scoring criteria written before bids arrived rather than after. The site structure was designed and issued as part of the tender rather than left to bidders: it means bidders price the same thing, comparison is meaningful, and the client’s information architecture is not quietly outsourced to whoever wins.
03 / Evaluate
Scored eight bids against the grid, not against impressions
Eight proposals were received and evaluated on technical and financial criteria against the published grid, with the PSD assuring the process met the donor’s regulations. Because the specification demanded named team CVs subject to client approval, three comparable references, and a designated project manager, the evaluation could assess capability rather than promises. Eight bids is the measure of whether a tender was real — a specification too vague to price attracts few serious offers; one written tightly enough to build against attracts competition.
04 / Supervise
Held the build to the specification until launch
ISEET supervised implementation across every phase the tender defined — requirements and envisioning, UI/UX design, development, testing, deployment to national hosting, documentation and training, and maintenance. The vendor produced a software requirements specification before design began, three design concepts for the PSD to choose from, and staging that ran alongside the live site until switch-over. Supervision is where a specification either holds or quietly erodes. Somebody has to read the SRS against the scope of work, check the security testing happened, and confirm the Arabic and English manuals exist before sign-off — and that is only credible because ISEET had nothing to win from the build going easy.
Captures from the live site. Left: a directorate subsite within the common framework. Right: online services and the contact directory.
We wrote the specification and we scored the bids. That only means something because we were never going to be the ones building it.
ISEET engagement lead
Outcome
One institution, one website.
Three national websites became one bilingual platform under the PSD domain, launched in March 2021, with the Civil Defence and Gendarmerie sites redirected into it and their content migrated rather than abandoned.
It has since grown into a large-scale national portal: more than 30 subsites, hundreds of pages, and online services delivered by directorates across the institution — administered not by one team but by many, each managing its own content within the common framework. That was the architecture’s purpose. A structure that only works when one department maintains it does not survive a national police service; one where each directorate owns its own section does.
30+
Directorate subsites on one portal
8
Proposals received and evaluated
3
National websites merged into one
Five years on, the portal is still running and still growing — which is the harder test. A merger site can look complete on launch day and calcify within a year, because nobody outside the original team can add to it. This one absorbed dozens of directorates and hundreds of pages under distributed administration, which is what the specification was written to make possible.
The independence is the point. ISEET specified the system, wrote the evaluation grid, scored the bids, and supervised delivery — and was never a candidate to build it. A specification written by the party that hopes to win the contract is not a specification; it is a proposal in disguise. Separating the two is what makes technical supervision worth commissioning.
The principle behind this
Where ISEET writes the specification or supervises the build, ISEET does not bid on it. That rule costs work. It is also the only thing that makes independent technical supervision mean anything.
September 2020 – December 2021 — launched March 2021
An independent development agency, selected from competing proposals by open tender
30+ directorate subsites, hundreds of pages, distributed administration
psd.gov.jo
Considering something similar?
If a build is going out to tender, the design and the acceptance criteria should exist first. That conversation is free.
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September 2020 – December 2021 — launched March 2021
An independent development agency, selected from competing proposals by open tender
30+ directorate subsites, hundreds of pages, distributed administration
psd.gov.jo
The platform behind this
Immunify is a product, not a bespoke build: six modules covering stock, cold chain, temperature, workforce, learning, and reporting.