OASIS Interact Community

A few days ago we posted the revised RFPs which we promised at our Industry Day in mid-May.  I hope by now that you’ve had time to review the documents and look forward to your comments and feedback.  In this blog entry I’d like to discuss some of the major changes we made.

One of the themes which we heard over and over again in our One-on-One sessions and in the comments received in response to the draft RFPs was that there seemed to be no connection between the pools and the disciplines as defined in Section C.  As things stood in the original, companies with no R&D experience at all, for example, could win in Pools 4 thru 6, which will involve predominantly R&D work.  Our initial response, which still stands to a large degree, was that the scope of OASIS and OASIS SB involves integration of complex professional services across multiple disciplines.  Companies which could successfully integrate those disciplines in one area could likely do it in any area.  Based on the feedback we received from industry and our customers, however, we saw that there was great value in ensuring that companies which win in a particular pool demonstrate at least some experience specific to that pool.  For this reason, we’ve decided to require that one of your Relevant Experiences come from work done in each pool in which you are bidding.  There are 6 pools, but 3 of them represent exceptions to NAICS codes listed in other pools.  If you qualify for Pools 1, 2, and 4, you qualify for them all. What this means is that companies in the R&D pools, for example, will have some demonstrated experience in doing R&D work.  We think this change will result in greater variety between the pools and allow greater opportunity for more focused, mid-sized companies to compete on a more even playing field, which was also a theme we heard repeatedly. 

The next major areas to be addressed are related to how we scored commercial experience as opposed to federal experience. First, we did not (and still do not) believe that OASIS should be a company’s first foray into government contracting.  There are a great deal of unique features to government contracting and there is great value to our customers in knowing that all OASIS and OASIS SB primes know how to manage the federal procurement process.  Second, we had concerns about the relative trustworthiness of past performance reports from warranted Contracting Officers versus those received from commercial business partners.  It is not, and never was, our intent to prevent companies with outstanding and innovative commercial solutions from bidding successfully.  Thus, we realized that our initial scoring system penalized commercial work in multiple areas:  we required 3 out of 5 experiences to be federal, we gave points to various systems, etc. which are unique to government contracting, and then we also gave fewer points for equivalently-rated commercial past performance.  We’ve listened and made adjustments, however.  Our decision to require experiences tied to the pools being bid removed the need to require experiences to be government.  By definition, only federal experience will have a NAICS code formally associated with it; therefore, we do not need additional restrictions on commercial experience.  We also realized that enough scoring factors lean favorably toward government work that we do not need to explicitly downgrade the scores of commercial experiences.   There are a number of factors in play for any given Relevant Experience.  As I’ve stated before, we don’t expect any perfect scores, even for individual experiences.  Some commercial work will score out higher than some federal and vice versa and that is fine with us.

The last major change I’d like to discuss today relates to Key Personnel.  We initially had scoring elements related to the education, experience, and certifications held by proposed Key Personnel.  We heard over and over again, however, that this was encouraging companies to bypass otherwise excellent candidates for these positions so as not to “give away” points.  It was certainly not our intent to keep good people out of the program.  Upon further consideration and discussion, we decided to simply eliminate these factors from the scoring.  All OASIS and OASIS SB contractors will have to manage their contracts successfully and they will need solid people to do that.  If they fail to do so, we can hold them accountable as needed.  Dormancy provides a great tool in this area.  We trust that companies will bring the right people to the task and we will hold them accountable if they do not.  That will more than suffice.

Of course, there are a number of other changes and I may address those in the future, based on your feedback and questions.  I hope that it is abundantly clear, however, that we did listen to the feedback received, that we did consider it thoughtfully; and that it did impact the procurement.  We have learned a great deal and gotten immense value out of the ongoing dialog that has taken place in this community and we hope to continue in that vein for the life of the program.

Jim