Update: The RFQ is live!
It’s game time. The Request for Quotation (RFQ) for the Agile Delivery Services Blanket Purchase Agreement (Agile Delivery BPA) is hitting the street on Wednesday, June 17, 2015. When the RFQ is released, we will post it on GitHub and the General Service Administration’s eBuy system (RFQ993471), and vendors will be able to submit responses to be part of the Agile Delivery BPA.
As you’ll see in the RFQ, we are requiring vendors currently on GSA Schedule 70 who want to be on the Agile Delivery BPA to compete among three pools: a design pool (a total set aside for small business), a development pool (also a total set aside for small business), and a full-stack pool (unrestricted). When the competition is completed, and awards are made, the vendors will be working on 18F projects, for our internal needs, and for our partner agencies.
Like we said before, we’re doing things a little differently in this procurement. We’re requiring vendors to submit a working prototype based on a public dataset and show their work in a publicly available git repository. We’re also requiring ourselves to adopt a rigorous evaluation methodology to ensure that the vendors can meet our needs.
Read more about why this is important.
We’ve learned a lot through this process, which admittedly took us longer than we expected. We learned from our partners within the General Services Administration about how to improve the BPA, and we helped educate them about how we work, and what we want our vendors to be able to do. As a result, we have a better RFQ than we started with.
This sort of learning is part of our process. There’s a reason we are describing the BPA in an alpha stage: we expect to continue to learn and improve as we proceed.
In terms of next steps, vendors on Schedule 70 will submit their prototypes and responses to the RFQ, GSA will review the responses, and awards will be made. Stay tuned for more updates on this effort.
Finally, to the vendor community, if you want to participate in our effort to transform the way the federal government delivers federal digital services, here’s a piece of advice: just ship it.
