GSA’s Investment Team Is Building An Agile Development Contract

The General Services Administration’s innovation investment arm, 10x, is planning to award a single-vendor blanket purchase agreement for agile development services worth as much as $10 million over five years.

The 10x team, part of GSA’s Technology Transformation Service, takes ideas from across the federal government and offers incremental funding and development to determine if those ideas are worthwhile at scale. In its earliest iterations, the project led to the development of programs like the U.S. Web Design Standards and Login.gov.

Using the pending BPA, 10x would be able to issue task orders to work on future projects.

Officials plan to make a single award to a small business, with a base period of one year and four one-year add-on options, according to request for quotation posted to GSA’s eBuy site last week.

The award will be made off of GSA’s IT Schedule 70, restricted to vendors with spots on the IT Professional Services (132-51) and Order Level Materials (70-500) special item numbers.

Officials expect to spend between $5 million to $10 million over the life of the contract, if all options are used. The performance work statement clarifies that this an estimate and the total could be higher without the need to amend the contract.

The office plans to evaluate prospective vendors through three phases: technical response, oral interview and price response. In the first phase, contracting officers will be looking at three criteria, including relevant experience—deemed the most important to this procurement—staffing approach and usability research approach.

Under staffing, 10x is looking for vendors who can field 10 specific positions: product manager, project manager, one technical lead, one user experience researcher/designer, front-end engineer,  back-end engineer, DevOps engineer, content designer, visual designer and data scientist.

Vendors who clear Phase I with a rating of “some confidence” or “high confidence” will move on to oral interviews.

Companies interested in bidding must submit responses through eBuy by 5 p.m. April 11. Questions are due by 5 p.m. Wednesday.