A council buys digital delivery through Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 by running a further competition. The DOS 7 framework has no direct award route. You publish your requirement on the Contract Award Service, every registered framework supplier can see it and respond, and you award against criteria you set and publish yourself.
That single mechanic shapes the rest of the process, including how early you start and how you handle an incumbent supplier whose contract is ending.
Before any of that starts you need the specification written, the assessment criteria settled, a Public Procurement Gateway account for whoever runs the competition, and a decision on which of the four lots the work sits in. None of it can be added later.
The framework is often called Digital Outcomes 7. The correct name is Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7, reference RM1043.9, and that is the version that will appear on your call-off contract.
The agreement is operated by the Government Commercial Agency (GCA, formerly Crown Commercial Service). Crown Commercial Service and the Cabinet Office central commercial teams merged to form the GCA on 1 April 2026, so older DOS guidance and some live call-off paperwork still carry the CCS name. The rename does not change the agreement or how you buy through it.
The agreement page gives a start date of 30 January 2026 while GCA’s news article of 31 March 2026 announced the framework as now live, and the two have never been reconciled publicly.
The current framework period runs to 29 July 2027. It is an open framework under the Procurement Act 2023, so it reopens to new suppliers during its life instead of fixing the supplier list at the point of award.
Digital Outcomes 6 (RM1043.8) and Digital Specialists and Programmes (RM6263) were both replaced by DOS 7, so any council whose internal process was written around either route is working from a dead reference.
GCA reported over 1,700 suppliers on the framework at 31 March 2026, 89 per cent of them small and medium-sized enterprises.
Every lot goes to further competition. G-Cloud 15 allows a buyer to award directly from the catalogue on every lot, and on G-Cloud 14, which remains the live route until 28 October 2026, direct award covered every lot except Lot 4.
You cannot continue with an incumbent supplier unless that supplier wins a fresh competition. For a council whose current contract ends inside the next quarter, that removes the extension-shaped option: specification, criteria, competition and award all have to happen inside the term you have left, or the service carries on with no contract under it.
The written specification and the published assessment criteria have to exist before you go to market. Forming a view on who should do the work first leaves you nothing defensible to award against.
GCA publishes no standard timescales for a DOS 7 competition. Figures circulating in supplier and bid consultancy guidance, including a commonly repeated one to two weeks for responses, do not come from GCA and should not be planned against. You set the response window in the specification, and it should reflect how much work you are asking suppliers to do to answer you.
This sequence follows GCA’s own buyer guidance on the agreement page.
GCA puts market engagement before drafting. Read the buyer guide and Framework Schedule 1 before you write anything.
You reach the Contract Award Service through a Public Procurement Gateway account. Confirm who inside your organisation holds that access before a timetable is built around it.
Both are written before you publish, and suppliers see the criteria alongside the requirement. Everything that will matter at evaluation has to be in the criteria at that point.
The Contract Award Service includes a filtering tool that narrows the supplier list by skills and services. It is worth running anyway, because it shows you the shape of the available market while the requirement is still open to change.
You must publish your requirement on the Contract Award Service. All framework suppliers registered on the platform can view it and respond.
The three differ by how many rounds of evaluation you run. Extra rounds narrow the field first, so only a shorter list is asked for detailed responses, which suits a broad requirement. You choose at specification stage.
You award against the criteria you published, publish the decision, and complete the call-off contract with the winning supplier.
The lot comes before drafting, because it sets the scope of what you are buying, and Framework Schedule 1 holds the definitive description of each. GCA’s guidance on when to use each lot reads:
One constraint applies across all four. GCA states that “each procurement can only be awarded to a single supplier”, so a requirement that needs a build and a hosting arrangement is two procurements.
With no direct award on the DOS 7 framework, the specification does more work here than it does on a catalogue framework. The four decisions below determine what comes back.
Name the lot in the requirement. It tells suppliers whether the work is theirs to answer, and it keeps the call-off consistent with the scope you bought under.
Specify the outcome and leave the solution to the supplier. Under Lot 1 the supplier carries responsibility for how the outcome is produced, so an implementation described in detail limits your field to the suppliers willing to build it your way.
Write criteria an SME can meet. On GCA’s own count, 89 per cent of the framework’s suppliers are SMEs, so criteria built around a large systems integrator will thin the response list without raising its quality.
Be specific about what you will evaluate. Wording loose enough to fit any answer produces responses you cannot separate.
The route decision comes first, and choosing between G-Cloud and DOS 7 turns on what you are buying rather than who you want to buy it from. Work that is essentially cloud hosting, software or support sits on G-Cloud, where direct award is available. Work that is a delivered outcome, a delivery partner, a named specialist or user research sits on DOS 7 and will be competed.
Then check who is on the list. Because the framework keeps admitting suppliers, a list you filtered for an earlier project is out of date rather than a shortcut.
Read the supplier pages before you shortlist. The platform listing shows who holds a place on the agreement, and suppliers publish their own framework positions too, which is where the delivery record sits.
If the time left on your current contract does not allow a competition to be run properly, that is a decision to escalate now rather than in the final month.
Both point to RM1043.9, but only Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 is the agreement’s real title. The shorter form is a back-formation from DOS 6, which genuinely dropped the second half. GCA restored it for this agreement, and that is what a call-off contract carries.
No. GCA’s wording on RM1043.9 is that there is no option to award without competition, and that holds across all four lots. The buyer publishes on the Contract Award Service, any supplier with a place on the agreement can respond, and the award is made against the criteria the buyer published. G-Cloud 15 differs here, allowing an award straight from the catalogue on every lot.
Lot 1 is Digital Outcomes, Lot 2 is Digital Capability and Delivery Partners, Lot 3 is Digital Specialists, and Lot 4 is User Research Studios and Participants. The definitive scope of each lot sits in Framework Schedule 1, which GCA asks buyers to read before writing a requirement.
Verified 4 August 2026.