Agile BPA’s First Project: Making FedRAMP More Transparent

The new contracting approach that allows a handful of vendors to sell "agile" services to the federal government will soon face its first test: the development of an online dashboard to track the government's process for authorizing cloud computing companies.

The General Services Administration’s tech consultancy team, 18F, has been refining the Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement, or Agile BPA, for several months. The team finally awarded spots on the agreement to the 17 firms in December after assessing their ability to complete digital development tasks. 

This week, 18F posted a draft request-for-quotations on its first project, a site that would show cloud vendors’ progress as they undergo the FedRAMP certification process.

The dashboard is designed to show which vendors are working on their certification and what services they offer, and to help agencies compare their services and vendors to those being used at other agencies, the draft says.

The draft RFQ, posted on code repository GitHub, notes the contractor would be responsible for the public beta launch of that dashboard. The work will be completed in two-week “sprints,” which will then be reviewed before further development.

The final RFQ could be posted sometime during the week of March 28, the post says.

The BPA had been halted multiple times by protests from tech vendors who were not awarded spots on the list.