Identify Joint Ventures whose primary work is Agile Software Development

                                                      Sources Sought Notice

PURPOSE: This Sources Sought Notice (hereinafter Notice) seeks to identify Joint Ventures whose primary work is Agile Software Development and who may be interested in opportunities supporting these types of projects at the Department of Treasury.

This Notice targets 1) established Joint Ventures between two small businesses, AND (2) established Joint Ventures between two entities with an approved Small Business Administration (SBA) Mentor-Protege Program (MPP) relationship.

BACKGROUND: The Department of the Treasury designs, builds, and maintains hundreds of digital products that serve its 100,000+ staff members, plus many high-profile public-facing digital products that provide Americans and international users with a variety of online services, including tax management, bonds purchasing, and tools that support a range of economic statutes and regulations. Current and future digital products cover a wide range of technical complexity, from static web pages to mainframe-based tax calculation engines and economic data modeling.

This requirement falls under NAICS Code 541511 Custom Computer Programming Services and PSC Code DA10 IT and Telecom - Business Application/application Development Software as a Service.

FUTURE STATE: The Department of Treasury, Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) is evaluating the process by which the Department and its Bureaus procure vendor services to build and support digital products, in order to adjust to recent changes in software development best practices. Our goal is to shift the dominant method of software development and delivery within the Department from a waterfall model, with lengthy predetermined requirements, to an Agile model that uses research and human-centered design to rapidly deliver value to end users. In order to execute this shift, we must ensure the right vendor partners are selected.

OCIO is exploring methods to identify partners who can help execute the shift; there are no incumbents for this effort as it would result in a new award for new work. Specifically, the OCIO sees the following three functional areas that need support:

• Full-scope Agile software development, including user research, user story development, user experience (UX) and graphic design, software development, testing, DevOps/cloud engineering, release management, data architecture, user analytics, and scrum leadership/Agile coaching.
• User research and UX design as its own free-standing requirement. This requirement would be valuable when the Government needs support defining a problem and envisioning potential solutions, but is not ready to begin developing a product.
• Technical guidance and code reviews of ongoing work (to include feedback on the engineering work products by the Government and/or other vendors)

POTENTIAL CONTRACTUAL MODEL: Conceptually, any award to support this type of work would:

• support all described Agile Software Development functional areas
• allow for the issuance of multiple orders
• be a multiple-award and each order would be competed
• support execution of multiple orders at the same time
• support short term engagements (1 – 6 months)
• be for smaller dollar values ($250K - $20M)
• be a mix of Labor Hour (LH) and Firm-Fixed-Price (FFP) (where possible) offerings

HOW TO SUBMIT A RESPONSE TO THIS NOTICE:

Responses to this Notice shall be submitted via email, with the requested two attachments, to _DL_AgileDigital@treasury.gov with the subject line “Treasury Notice_Joint Venture_Agile Software Development”. Responses are due 2 August 2024 at 9am EST. Any responses received after this date and time may or may not be considered in any decision-making process resulting for this information gathering phase.

INFORMATION TO INCLUDE IN A RESPONSE TO THIS NOTICE:

Businesses who meet the criteria described in the PURPOSE paragraph and are interested in supporting the work described in this Notice are asked to provide a response that provides the following:

Using the attached .xls file provide:

1. Identify the:
   1. JV name
   2. Associated Unique Entity ID (UEI)
   3. The companies who represent the totality of the JV
2. Affirm the identified JV is between:
   1. two small business or
   2. through an authorized SBA MPP JV
3. The category of small business of the JV (e.g., Veteran Owned, Woman Owned, 8(a), etc.).
4. Identify existing and available contract vehicles of the JV.

Provide the following information in a .pdf file no greater than 3 pages. This document shall be designed and styled in a manner befitting a product you might deliver to a customer.

        5. Provide a brief narrative of the parties’ experience performing Agile Software Development work for government or                        commercial customers, either as a joint venture or as an individual entity. Include URLs to active government digital products            where appropriate.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• This Notice does not obligate the government to issue a solicitation, make an award, or otherwise take any subsequent action(s). In addition, the government will not be obligated to pursue any, or any specific, acquisition approach as a result of this Notice.
• The government will not acknowledge receipt of submissions or provide feedback. Responses to this Notice will NOT be considered offers and will NOT be accepted by the government to form a binding contract or agreement. Responses to the Notice will NOT be returned.
• The government will not pay for any information provided in response to this Notice, and any information provided may be used freely by the government for any purposes deemed necessary. The government, further, reserves the right to use any non-proprietary technical information received in response to this Notice in any resulting solicitation(s).
• Respondents are asked to provide accurate, complete, and sufficiently detailed information to enable acquisition approach decisions to be made.
• The government reserves the right to meet with some or none of the interested parties responding to this notice, for any reason.
• If any resulting solicitation(s) are issued, related to the described requirement, they may deviate slightly or considerably from what is noted here.