VA acquisitions asks vendors to show their work

For a long time, I have been critical of the excessive reliance for vendor selection in the federal government on written vendor proposals, that back in the day were so voluminous that they literally sometimes needed to be delivered by truck. (Things have gotten somewhat better since then.)

The basic element of such proposals was a series of statements about what the vendor would do if awarded the work. Wouldn’t it make more sense, I have repeatedly suggested, to find a way to judge bidders not on what they say but what they have actually done in the past? This view was an important element behind the push in the 1990s, when I served as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Office of Management and Budget, to make vendor past performance more important in awarding contracts.

In 2017, I first learned about tech demos as an innovative vendor selection approach being used by Soraya Correa, the Department of Homeland Security's then-chief procurement officer. The basic idea was to give people the same problem (say writing software for a certain need), to put a team of vendor personnel into a room for a certain period of time, and to have them submit what they came up with at the end, which was then evaluated by the government. This was a direct application of the principle "do, don’t say". At the time, I called tech demos “the next big thing in IT procurement.”

It turned out, however, that my prediction was at best premature. There have been sporadic uses of tech demos over the past almost-decade -- and in 2021 USDS published a Tech Challenge Playbook that presented practical advice about how to do them. But no normal observer would have detected a mass movement.

 This now may be changing, as tech demos have gotten two things successful procurement innovations require – a champion and a dedicated contract vehicle. 

The champion is a VA contracting officer named Troy Loveland. The contract vehicle is 10 new digital services contracts that the VA awarded October 1 under the acronym SPRUCE, a sort of arboreal acronym followup to their earlier digital services contract with the acronym CEDAR. The contract ceiling on SPRUCE is $2.5 billion, 10 times higher than the ceiling on CEDAR. It was competed among service-disabled veteran owned small businesses.

The VA contracting officer working on SPRUCE is named Troy Loveland. I first came in contact with Loveland after asking Traci Walker at USDS to put me in touch with an outstanding young contracting professional I might write about here as a way to spotlight young feds in procurement. Talking with him, I learned that Loveland was interested in using tech demos in digital acquisitions he was working on. He first used a tech demo at the request of a customer, and liked the method so much he decided to use it more on his own initiative.

The 10 vendors on SPRUCE will be offered an opportunity to compete on all the task orders – the latest sign of the major progress the government has made in recent years in improving competition for task order awards under big IDIQ contracts. VA has announced that under SPRUCE, task orders will be able to be competed based on traditional written proposals, but also based on tech demos, submission of actual products the vendor has developed or coding challenges.

Troy Loveland is helping to bring "do, don’t say" into the acquisition mainstream. Good for him.