GSA’s 18F Digital Services team has announced it is partnering with the Office of Integrated Technology Services to establish a government-wide blanket purchase agreement with vendors that specialize in agile delivery services.
With agile development 18F wants agencies to be able to go from solicitation to contract kickoff within four weeks, and to deliver a minimum viable product – MVP, within three months.
GSA itself will begin using an “alpha” BPA under a contract award for infrastructure-as-a-service, given to Aquilent in November. The five-year $100 million contact will provide cloud infrastructure services to all of GSA and includes access to Amazon Web Services and Aquilent’s professional services on Schedule 70.
18F recently posted a request for information on FedBizOpps and GSA eBuy from vendors “seeking information about the agile delivery capabilities (e.g., user-centered design, agile architecture, agile software development, test-driven development, API-first design, DevOps) of vendors under GSA IT Schedule 70.”
“Being able to develop products quickly, and have the ability to scale them up are hallmarks of the agile design process that OCSIT and 18F are implementing at GSA and across government,” said Phaedra Chrousos, associate administrator, OCSIT/18F. “Having easy access to infrastructure services will dramatically reduce the time to get products in the hands of users,” she added.
GSA said it soon will begin developing a beta version of the agile delivery services BPA for use government-wide, something that it anticipates will take six – eight months. The beta will include an outreach component for on-boarding new companies that want to compete for a spot on the BPA onto Schedule 70, GSA said.
