Hi All —
We’ve been working hard on RFP-EZ trying to come up with a system that really works for all the parties involved in small contracting. We’d love your feedback on our general thoughts so far, which are here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nm9k5do801umh2u/RFP-EZ%20Product%20Documentation.doc
It’s a loose spec of the various products we intend to build, but subject to a lot of change right now. Feel free to comment on this in this post.
Great doc – just gave it a read. I think you identified the problems & challenges pretty good & have a pretty ambitious scope through January but I know you’ll pull it off
These are great ideas, and of course all of these ideas have been tried before, as CTO Park often says. I think the team should talk to Julie Basille, perhaps the person who has most successfully worked across the burcratic stove pipes and in the field making these types of things work. Also, I would suggest that the team create a lessons learned on Procurement Desktop, Grants.gov and the Initegrated Acquisition Environment early business case, so that this effort can succeed faster and with less trial and error. While technology is a facilitator here, strong White House change management of today’s bureacratic actions are the key element that will determine the success or failure. Otherwise, the team risks falling into the “field of dreams” trap, as I am sure they realize. I’d like to see some more elements of that in the thought paper in order to assess the value of specific proposals.
What a great list of projects!! Let me offer one suggestion, however. The current commercial acquisition management solution providers in this market niche, namely: 1) Distributed Solutions, Inc., 2) Compusearch, 3) Appian, 4) CGI-Federal, 5) CACI and 6) SAP, all provide in-production software solutions to numerous Federal agencies which provide much of the functionality that you describe, especially in bullets 3, 4, 5, and 6 actually much more functionality – depending on which specific solution(s) you are talking about) under the Contracting Officer section of your Drop-Box posting.
Have you evaluated each of these company’s offerings? I suspect not since we were not asked for a demo…that I know of. You may wish to look at all their offerings (both small and large business) to determine what they do not already provide and what they do not plan to provide. This way you guys can fill in the “gaps” and really make a tremendous positive impact on the lives of our Federal contracting community.
Please let any of us (from the commercial acquisition solution vendor community) if we can help. I am sure my collegues from competitor firms would agree with this statement. Cheers and keep up the good work.
By the way, Mark’s suggestion that you talk with Julie Basile is totally on-target. Julie is A-1 in my book and she is an out-of-the-box thinker and problem solver.
Pete
it is an interesting look at somene trying a new approach. will be interesting to see where it ends up. there are plenty who have been doing so for a long time and managing the complexities is no esy chalenge. http://www.globalkap.com