During the session, the state of California updated the vendor community on the timeline for the three RFPs that have been released so far and discussed lessons learned on the agile procurement. The one-hour meeting is posted online here.
As one state official said, California knows that "everything did not go great" and wants to hear from vendors where it can improve. One vendor representative, meanwhile, said California should be credited for conducting as open a procurement process as it has ever done.
A few observations from the meeting:
- Peter Kelly, deputy director of the state’s Child Welfare Services Division, said the state doesn't yet have enough data to say whether the cost of the project will be appreciably different than was forecast before the state switched this year to agile. Cost savings is not California's primary expectation of moving to agile, Kelly said. It's about delivering business value to users sooner, he said.
- State officials and vendors appeared to agree that using California Public Contract Code 6611, which enables the state and vendors to negotiate during a procurement, was useful to help address some of the problems that cropped up.
- Ben Flores assistant deputy director, Statewide Technology Procurement Division, said it has been challenging to fit the agile procurement approach into the state's current policies and processes. State CIO Amy Tong, who was on hand at the meeting, noted that the child welfare system is a demonstration project that will show where California should modify its requirements.
- Kelly said the state plans to host a session in August where California will share impressions from the selection process from the pre-qualified pool of agile developers the Health and Human Services Agency announced earlier this month. California qualified 11 firms for the pool from a total of 24 submissions. All submissions will be posted on a public GitHub Web page, Kelly said.
— A contract for development of an Application Programming Interface competitively awarded to Taborda Solutions was executed on June 27.
— The procurement award for the Intake Implementation contract is expected to be completed by the end of August 2016.
— Another contract, for Intake Implementation, is scheduled to be finished in December 2016
— The first RFO for the pre-qualified pool of agile developers is scheduled to be released in September 2016.
The state encourages vendors to submit any other questions to CWS-NSP@osi.ca.gov.
