• Answer the following questions related to this case:
  • Describe some of the ways this acquisition was unique and innovative.
  • Based on the Lessons Learned, do you think the issues faced in this acquisition were foreseeable?  Or did the VA have no way of knowing or anticipating those issues? Explain your reasoning.
  • This contract was released as a Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned Small Business set aside.  Do you agree that was the correct way for the VA to execute this?  Could it have been executed differently (i.e., different or multiple set asides)?  Justify 
  • Was the seven-month time frame from identification of need to contract award reasonable in your opinion?  Why or why not?
  • If you were the contracting officer for this acquisition, would you have done anything differently?  If so, what?  If not, why?  Explain 

The VA competitively awarded a task order for digital services off of the agency's Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle called Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Next Generation (T4NG). A coding exercise was leveraged as part of the evaluation. Background Every day, Veterans apply for health benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Those whose claims are denied can file an appeal to the Court of Veteran Appeals by using the VA's Enterprise Appeals Process. However, customers using the system encountered several issues that prevented them from completing the appeals process online. These issues, coupled with other systemic inefficiencies, meant that hundreds of thousands of Veterans endured waiting for long periods of time for a claim to be resolved. To help resolve the technological inefficiencies in the claims process, the U.S. Digital Service embedded a team at the VA. Their work focused on modernizing the VA's Enterprise Appeals Process to enable efficient adjudication of appeals. On arrival, the team began to quickly develop remedies to fix the system. In order to continue the pace of work, they realized they needed more developer support. They decided to use a vendor to provide the additional developer support services to execute the project on the scale needed. To ensure they got the right team to assist on this project, they evaluated the offerors with a coding exercise. This case study tells the story. Lessons Learned 1. In a coding exercise, ensure you have the technical talent on the evaluation team that knows how to evaluate quality of code submission. 2. Technical team should have ability to understand and replicate an ideal submission. 3. Determine if it is necessary to have a written submission when doing a exercise. The written portion can present an additional financial burden to the company that may not be necessary if evaluating the code submission will provide sufficient insight into technical ability of company. 4. Consider use of a 2-step (down-select) process in the solicitation to decrease vendors' bid and proposal costs 5. If requiring a written portion, consider when is the best time to require it. In the case of this acquisition, vendor feedback indicated that upfront submission of the written portion was preferred since the code submission was more expensive. 6. Within the evaluation, the Government should be cautious about imposing go/no go wording. For example, stating within Code Quality a requirement that "there are no flagrant misspellings or typos" can become very binary, and lead to unwanted deficiencies. 7. Consider whether your evaluation criteria allows for sufficient strengths and weaknesses. 8. Prior to the solicitation, ensure that your team clearly understands potential deficiencies. For example, must the vendor complete all user stories or are there specific stories that are key? During the evaluation phase, the team realized that theoretically a vendor could have made an excellent submission even if they had not completed all user stories."