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How one company changed to meet new IT contract styles

March 11, 2019 By Andrew Smith

Federal agencies are changing the way they structure IT contracts, asking for more proof-of-concept and capability up front instead of basing decisions on a portfolio of past work.

“We’re increasingly seeing requests for proposals, and what the RFP is asking for is, instead of a written response, show up with a team and deploy a product by the end of the day,” said Charles Onstott, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SAIC, in an interview with Federal Times. “What that challenge is demonstrating is your ability to do that, and then that would lead to follow-on work.”

To meet the new contracting requirements, SAIC in October 2018 created its Innovation Factory, a component of the company that relies on innovative and fast working teams of IT professionals to meet current contract requirements, prepare to bid on potential contracts and experiment with new products.

“We launched this really in response to some of the major trends that we’re seeing in the federal government, and one of them is to do app modernization, but to do it rapidly in an incremental delivery fashion,” said Onstott.

“The other is [the Department of Defense’s] push to do more agile across DoD, agile acquisition.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/2019/02/27/how-one-company-changed-to-meet-new-it-contract-styles/ 

Filed Under: Contracting Tips Tagged With: agile, capability, DoD, innovation, proof-of-concept, SAIC, technology

TSA wants industry input on its proposed agile contract vehicle

November 12, 2018 By Andrew Smith

The Transportation Security Administration is asking industry to weigh in on its strategy for building a bullpen of tech companies the agency could call on to stand up new software applications.

The agency last week issued a special notice detailing its Fast Agile Scalable Teams procurement program, a proposed contract vehicle TSA plans to use to acquire custom software and modernize legacy systems.

Vendors selected under the blanket purchase agreement would be required to apply agile methodology—breaking large projects into smaller chunks, developed in sprints—to build and maintain a suite of enterprisewide software applications.

“In order to successfully execute [its] mission, TSA must have the capability to customize mission support systems [and] develop custom software solutions when no solution is commercially available or from government sources,” the agency wrote in a performance work statement.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/11/tsa-wants-industry-input-its-proposed-agile-contract-vehicle/152590/

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: agile, agile services, applications, contracting vehicle, software, TSA, US DOT

Reforms deliver wins for small businesses

August 30, 2018 By Andrew Smith

By some metrics, 2017 was a banner year for small business federal contractors. In May 2018, the Small Business Administration announced that, for the first time, the federal government exceeded $100 billion in prime contract awards to small businesses in fiscal year 2017.

Despite reaching this milestone, small business federal contracting still has room for improvement. For example, the SBA’s data also show that the percentage of total federal contracting dollars earned by small businesses declined for the second year in a row, falling to 23.8 percent from a historic high of 25.7 percent for fiscal year 2015.

Given these mixed results, is there a case for near-term optimism for the small business contracting community? Recent changes to federal caps on the use of micro-purchasing and simplified acquisition methods hold the promise of more agile acquisition, benefitting small businesses.

Indicative of the big changes forthcoming is a June 2018 White House Office of Management and Budget memo streamlining small business contractors’ access to federal contracting opportunities.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2018/7/27/reforms-deliver-wins-for-small-businesses

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: agile, DoD, FPDS, micropurchase, OMB, SAP, SAT, SBA, simplified acquisition, small business

Agile: Think big, start small — now!

February 21, 2017 By Andrew Smith

No one has more customers than government.

Its vital services including public safety, education and health care (to name a few) are relied on by hundreds of millions of people every day. The room for error is zero. Public servants get little in the way of compliments for doing their work well, but can make it to the front page, above the fold, if they make a mistake. As a result, changing a process that works, even if it is inefficient, anachronistic or opaque, is a hard case to make.

Over time, though, cost-pressure, citizen complaints or some sort of process failure can create energy to revisit the status quo. However, once the go-ahead is received, the tendency is to try to fix everything, all at once. This all-in approach is the result of a number of tendencies in government, or any large organization, and poses a number of key risks.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/agile-think-big-start-small-now/

Filed Under: Contracting Tips Tagged With: agile, small business

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