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NITAAC CIO-SP4


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We’ve mentioned the CIO-SP3 GWAC here before on a few occasions.  The solicitation for the follow-on CIO-SP4 is scheduled for release soon.  It’s valued at $40 billion so it’s really significant.  The interesting aspect is a three phase evaluation.  Offerors submit corporate experience in the first phase and use a self scoring worksheet.  The second phase is a go/no-go assessment of fulfilling mandatory requirements.  Phase 3 evaluates a ten page technical proposal where 5 pages address a sample task and the other 5 pages is for a management plan.  Price and past performance are also evaluated.

Offerors get notified of they make the cut at each phase.  NIH anticipates lots of protests with an estimated 1000 responses. They feel the phased approach allows them to deal with protests while allowing other phases to continue.  Still they are anticipating 450 awards.

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There’s a lot of information on the website including draft RFP. https://nitaac.nih.gov/cio-sp4

It looks like offerors complete pricing spreadsheets using NIH defined standard labor category definitions.

I don’t know for certain but after reading articles about Brian Goodger, the cio-sp3 program manager, it seems like the two part technical proposal is for two purposes - provide assurances that offerors know the medical research and healthcare end of HHS and can manage a very wide divergent mix of labor categories.  That mix covers such a wide variety of work, it must take quite a bit of teaming to respond.  Not saying whether written responses are good or bad but apparently NIH feels it’s necessary.

GSA had good experiences with what NIH is doing with Phase 1 and that’s requiring offerors to submit corporate experience information and doing a self assessment.  Somewhere along the way, NIH included that as a separate phase because it’s not in the draft RFP.  

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Ten pages in each of 1,000 expected responses comes to 10,000 pages to be read by the evaluation team. Why don't they just give contracts to all of the 1,000 and let the ordering agencies decide which ones they want to do business with?

Honestly, it make me very sad to know that I won't live long enough to see my country have an intelligent contracting process.

 

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I think giving a contract to everybody is what the Navy did with SeaPort.  There are over 5,000 awardees.

i personally don’t see advantages with these major multiple award IDIQ contract pools.  With hundreds of awards and complying with fair opportunity, what’s there to really gain.  Now if the number of awards are limited to a small number such as 5 in each technical area, that’s a different story.

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6 hours ago, Vern Edwards said:

Ten pages in each of 1,000 expected responses comes to 10,000 pages to be read by the evaluation team. Why don't they just give contracts to all of the 1,000 and let the ordering agencies decide which ones they want to do business with?

Honestly, it make me very sad to know that I won't live long enough to see my country have an intelligent contracting process.

 

Thanks to you, it is far more intelligent now than it would have been without your presence.

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16 hours ago, formerfed said:

i personally don’t see advantages with these major multiple award IDIQ contract pools.

Maybe GAO needs to do another one of these (reference follows)?  I was intrigued when I first read it that single award IDIQ's prevailed with regard to dollars spent.  Have the dynamics changed in the pursuit of "flexibility and administrative ease"?

https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/684079.pdf

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26 minutes ago, C Culham said:

Maybe GAO needs to do another one of these (reference follows)?  I was intrigued when I first read it that single award IDIQ's prevailed with regard to dollars spent.  Have the dynamics changed in the pursuit of "flexibility and administrative ease"?

https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/684079.pdf

GAO mentions single award IDIQ prevailed.  The advantages of flexibility and administrative ease are obvious there.  CIO-SP4, the remainder of GWACS, and big multiple award pools like Navy SeaPort-e have huge numbers of awardees.  450 awards are anticipated for CIO-SP4.  SeaPort has over 5,000.  Those require providing “fair opportunity” notices and allowing all interested and otherwise qualified offerors responding to the notice to compete.  Most ordering agencies use a full blown solicitation rather than a streamlined solicitation to solicit as well.  So my question is what does this buy someone that does an open market solicitation?  

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25 minutes ago, formerfed said:

GAO mentions single award IDIQ prevailed.  The advantages of flexibility and administrative ease are obvious there.  CIO-SP4, the remainder of GWACS, and big multiple award pools like Navy SeaPort-e have huge numbers of awardees.  450 awards are anticipated for CIO-SP4.  SeaPort has over 5,000.  Those require providing “fair opportunity” notices and allowing all interested and otherwise qualified offerors responding to the notice to compete.  Most ordering agencies use a full blown solicitation rather than a streamlined solicitation to solicit as well.  So my question is what does this buy someone that does an open market solicitation?  

No disagreement.  The hidden implication of the GAO review in my view, at least back then, is that agencies setting up multiple award IDIQ's as being discussed here seems to be a waste of time as no one really uses them.   Seems a disconnect between a central office or  whatever it might be called versus that of the folks for whom they are created for.

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