OPM is acquiring a system to replace 119 agency HR systems with a single one. It is exceedingly complex and will force individual agency HR processes to adapt and revise many unique agency practices. The good part of the acquisition is OPM is relying upon offeror demonstrated capabilities and experiences as a significant part of the evaluation instead of using written proposal submissions and heavy CPARS references. It is really an evidence based selection. It’s not about “submit a written approach to show you will do it” to “tell us what you’re done and demonstrate how it works to meet our need.”

The first part of the evaluation is advisory and consists of submission of case studies (past performance experiences), description of out-of-the-box capabilities (what off-the-shelf currently exists in present form) and identification of other required capabilities that must be provided through configuration or customization, and a virtual demonstration of the offering in performing three typical HR scenarios.

The second part includes evaluating a written approach to implementing the full system nationwide, operational testing of the system by government personnel, and a comprehensive demonstration using a government provided business scenario with a Q&A session in an oral presentation type format. Detailed pricing is also submitted in this part and is separately evaluated.

The SAM ID for the solicitation is 24322626R0007 and titled Federal Human Resources Information Technology (HRIT) Modernization

24322626R0007

18 hours ago, formerfed said:

It is exceedingly complex and will force individual agency HR processes to adapt and revise many unique agency practices.

Good: 119 HR systems is too many. Consolidation seems like a good idea.

Bad: It is the intent of government for all agencies to go live by July 4, 2027.

Completing the transition for the entire federal government - both civilian and military - in 18 months is impossible. Everyone involved knows this. That this ludicrous goal made it into the solicitation is a very bad sign.

Terrible. FFP. Given the complexity, large dollars and ludicrously short designed-to-fail delivery schedule, there are very high risks of many types of bad to catastrophic failure, which the contractor will be nominally absorbing. So this is going to cost...a lot. A FFP contract is going to be galactically expensive (now or later). The GVT cannot actually transfer risk of a mega-project like this onto the contractor, so it's getting the costs of FFP, but not the benefits.

@General.Zhukov I have to assume OPM and GSA, who is assisting OPM, understand the complexities and what is possible from industry. They conducted one-on-one market research meetings with each identified candidate offeror. They also solicited two separate Requests for Information before finalizing the solicitation.

The strategy calls for the successful offeror to provide the system as Software as a Service (SAAS) so the burden is on the contractor to set up the software and operate it. There’s not much on the government side to provide system operation. Since the basic software must be demonstrated as part of the evaluation, OPM should have a decent handle on risk of an offeror not being about to perform. So it all gets down to what can an offeror provide OOTB, what needs added through configuration, and what needs customized?

The anticipated contract is not a total FFP effort. Rather it’s an IDIQ contract with dozens of individual fixed price line items for incremental portions of the overall effort. Take a look at Section B of the RFP.

I’m keenly aware of industry promises to do everything and fail miserably. I’m been involved with IT contracting (starting with mainframe buys in the mid-1970’s) and there are very few instances where everything went soomthly from start to finish. Plus there are lots of flat out failures.

But I only brought this up as a good example because of the evaluation methodology relies upon demonstrated abilities rather than written dreams contained only in proposals.

14 hours ago, formerfed said:

demonstrated abilities rather than written dreams

I agree with that. For a large risky IT project - which consolidating >100 separate HR systems into one, for ~2,000,000 employees, in 18 months, after having fired the staff of the agencies upon which the success of this project depends, is indeed - the thing that matters is what the offeror has done.

A good 1102 CE exercise is to have student/class pick some very familiar software (like MS Word, Gmail.) and attempt to describe it in a "technical approach" style and notice how woefully that compares to just showing how the software works. Would you, as an evaluator, know more about MS Word's ability to do what you want after 10 minutes of using MS Word, or after having read a 100-page pdf about MS Word?