Three years ago, Mark Schwartz felt like a hostage of the procurement process.

Long lead times and even longer award periods often led to vendor lock-in and poor performance, if not outright project failure. Companies would spend months preparing long proposal documents; agencies would take many more months combing through them; and, in the end, no one was really sure if the work would be done right and on time.

"We're, in a way, at the mercy of our contractors because they know it would be a huge effort for us to recompete their contracts — they know we'd have to invest a lot of resources and it would take a lot of time," the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services CIO said. "Whereas if we could compete contracts really quickly, then we would have less incentive to maintain a relationship that's not working that well."

That reality is not unique to USCIS. Schwartz is also not the first, nor is he the last, to recognize that the standard procurement process is broken — stifling, if not preventing entirely the government's ability to tap the innovation that drives the commercial world.

But while some anxiously await regulatory change to improve how procurements are done, Schwartz and a few select others have found a way to work within the system to force a new approach and, perhaps, a new way forward.

Forcing contractors to prove their worth

As Schwartz started moving his agency toward more agile IT development methods, he wanted a contracting structure that could support the speed and flexibility of the products those vendors were meant to produce.

The first attempt at this is USCIS's Flexible Agile Development Services (FADS) contract, a unique approach that involves shorter contract terms and rolling competitions.

The vehicle started in September 2014 with four contractors, each with two software development teams. Six months in, USCIS reassessed each team's performance and decided whether to add more teams from that contractor, decrease their participation or keep it the same.

After that first reevaluation round, two contractors were increased to four teams, one to three and the fourth stayed at two. As FADS nears the one-year mark, Schwartz's shop is getting ready for another evaluation round, ultimately planning to have up to 20 development teams working directly with USCIS employees.

By reassessing vendors' work at regular intervals, the FADS contract has a competitive incentive built in.

"We figured this way the contractors have to keep making sure they keep us happy and look good compared to the other contractors," Schwartz said.

Using this approach, the agency went from issuing a new capability every couple of years to every quarter. As FADS has kicked into high gear, every quarter has become every week.

In the near future, Schwartz said he hopes to be releasing new apps and software updates every day.

The competitive part of the process has worked well, but Schwartz and his team are still working to improve the early solicitation process, particularly around long, complicated RFPs.

Schwartz's team used a paper-based request for proposal for the initial FADS. That method worked well enough but was hardly ideal, he said.

Vendors have to constantly prove they can deliver working products in an agile, cooperative environment but Schwartz wants to know they can do that up front, before even making it through the initial awards.

"Everyone knows what we want to hear in a proposal. Many of them can deliver it — certainly even the ones who can't deliver what we're looking for know how to say they can," he said. "We're not just looking for someone who can parrot what was in our solicitation or someone who can copy-and-paste from Wikipedia — I want things that actually show a depth of understanding."

Schwartz said USCIS is looking at options like in-person demos and challenges to get away from paper-based solicitations — options like the Agile Delivery Blanket Purchase Agreement in development at the General Services Administration's 18F.

An agile contract for agile development

The innovation team at 18F was created to help GSA and other agencies break into the latest IT development practices, with a particular focus on agile development.

Before 18F had reached a year old, the volume of work being requested was already outstripping the team's ability to deliver, prompting them to look outside to the private sector for vendors that could compliment their work.

But just as 18F is trying to change the way government develops IT, the team wants to change the way the government buys services, as well.

Rather than issue a 100-page RFP asking companies to explain their agile capabilities in writing, 18F based the Agile Delivery BPA around a development sprint with a working product as the final proposal.

In agile development "you prioritize working software over everything else," said David Zvenyach, 18F director of acquisition management. "We're not asking for past performance, we're not asking for a lot of management narrative; we're asking for working software."

In order to qualify, vendors had to demonstrate an ability to quickly write a software prototype that met all the requirements and, most importantly, worked.

Those sprints wrapped up in early July and 18F is now reviewing the submissions with an eye toward awarding 20 spots on the BPA by early fall.

Zvenyach said the first iteration of the BPA is an alpha test but he hopes the model will eventually scale out across government.

"We want to buy digital services in a different way than we bought them before," he said. "We want the experience that we've had at 18F to scale beyond just building it internally."

Vendors who participated in the sprint were similarly enthusiastic about the model taking hold.

"I certainly hope that this is a new way to do [procurements] going forward," said Joe Truppo, senior manager at Octo Consulting, a contender on the Agile Delivery BPA. "Instead of us delivering 40 pages saying what we could do, we actually got a chance to show them what we could do."

"We were super excited — this is the kind of procurement we really would love to see," CivicActions CEO and co-founder Henry Poole agreed. "We don't have to have a whole crew of translators to take what we do and translate it into a whole other language ... It doesn't require a team of $500-an-hour experts to come in and tell you how to do it."

Vendors like CivicActions and Octo Consulting are hoping procurements like this usher in a new era of government contracting — one based on a company's ability to produce rather than the size of its internal RFP shop.

Octo Consulting President Mehul Sanghani said he sees this as an opportunity for smaller companies to break into the federal market, as larger companies — particularly large defense contractors — have designed their business models around the traditional RFP process.

When starting out, "one of the biggest barriers for us was we didn't have a big bid proposal machine," said Bill Ogilvie, vice president of government sales at CivicActions. "We didn't have the capability of going section-by-section and understanding what all these terms meant and how do you write toward that ... There's just so much confusion in these large RFPs."

The 18F BPA "is agile in a sense that these are agile delivery services but it is also agile in the sense that we are approaching the procurement process with an agile method," Zvenyach said.

"We were pretty excited not to see a 100-page RFP with a bunch of extraneous requirements," Ogilvie said. "Instead, it really seemed to drive toward what they wanted versus what they had to have because of the FAR."

Innovating without breaking the rules

While the procurement strategy is unique, 18F was able to build the Agile Delivery BPA without coloring outside the lines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

"The regulations that exist allow us to do a great deal," Zvenyach said of the FAR, pointing specifically to the Digital Service's TechFAR. "We've spent a great deal of time thinking through how can we — within existing law, within existing regulations — achieve an outcome that's better for us."

Schwartz and the USCIS contracting team were also able to accomplish their goal while staying well within the FAR.

"It took a lot of creativity but what I found with the FAR is that once you understand it — and understand the ideas behind it — it's not so hard to work those ideas into what you're doing," he said. "The FAR requires that we have requirements for the competition ... but that doesn't mean system requirements."

Instead, the FADS solicitation focused on what USCIS really wanted: agile software development.

The RFP asked for "higher level requirements," such as agile development skills, experience with certain technologies and the ability to work in a collaborative environment.

"All that went into the requirements for the [RFP] but not the exact system requirements for what they were going to be developing," Schwartz said. Those requirements were issued based on the projects those teams ended up working on.

"There's a lot we can do with the FAR exactly as it is right now but it does take some breaking out of the patterns we've been using in the past," he said.

Looking ahead, Schwartz said he wants to shorten the procurement window drastically and has issued a challenge to his staff to develop a solicitation life cycle that can be completed — start to finish — in 30 days.

"At this point, nobody thinks it can be done," he said. "But I'm pretty sure it can with some changes to how we do things."

Right now, the idea is to create modular contracting language for scopes of work that can be mixed and matched to develop RFPs on the fly.

If done correctly, vendors can respond in a timely manner, participate in a one- or two-day challenge to qualify, exact requirements can be fleshed out during the project phase, and awards can be issued.

Schwartz said he hopes to see some pilots for this approach before the end of the fiscal year.

About Aaron Boyd

Aaron Boyd is an awarding-winning journalist currently serving as editor of Federal Times — a Washington, D.C. institution covering federal workforce and contracting for more than 50 years — and Fifth Domain — a news and information hub focused on cybersecurity and cyberwar from a civilian, military and international perspective.

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