18F’s agile pilot purchase order finally launches after protests
After a months-long process of defending its Agile Delivery Services Blanket Purchase Agreement pilot procurement vehicle against contract challenges, the General Services Administration’s 18F is finally set to start awarding work on it.
18F received several bid protests on pool three of the Agile BPA throughout the solicitation process — GSA would not comment on the specific litigation and from whom it received protests. It appears from court filings that at least Octo Consulting Group, Inc.; MetroStar Systems, Inc.; InfoZen, Inc.; and TCG, Inc. submitted protests on the contract.
“Our intent via the protest was driven by a desire to understand as much as we could about the evaluation process and ensure we could more effectively respond to future requirements,” Mehul Sanghani, CEO of Octo Consulting, said in a statement, while maintaining his company’s ” enthusiastic support for 18F and their commitment to transparency and delivering user-centric agile solutions to the government market.”
“Unfortunately, today’s procurement environment does not lend itself to constructive feedback to improve future proposal efforts. The protest process afforded us greater visibility that will allow us to pursue future bid efforts,” he added.
Tuesday night, the final protest was resolved, allowing the 18F team to move forward with offering agencies services from the awardees, which were announced in August. The pool of 16 firms has since been bumped to 17, with the addition of company InQbation since the initial announcement.
[Read more: GSA, 18F award first series of agile software contracts]
“Now that the protest litigation on the Agile BPA Pool 3 has concluded GSA looks forward to providing cutting edge agile development services to agencies across government through this BPA,” a GSA spokeswoman said in an emailed statement to FedScoop.
The team will also announce the awardees for pools one and two in coming weeks, 18F’s Dave Zvenyach wrote in a blog post.
“Now that we’re past this final hurdle, we can officially say that the Agile BPA is live,” he wrote.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated Dec. 21 to include comments from Octo Consulting.
Reach the reporter on this story at billy.mitchell@fedscoop.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillyMitchell89.
