California has pushed back the timeline about three months for one of the first two modular procurements associated with the agile development of the state's new child welfare system.
Final proposals are now due May 12 for the intake module that will built as part the Child Welfare Services - New System (CWS-NS) project, the Office of Systems Integration (OSI) announced Wednesday. The contract award is now scheduled for Aug. 5.
OSI director John Boule explained the delay in an email to Techwire this week:
"The schedule adjustment was directly related to the significant interest of the vendor community, as evidenced by the number of questions the project received. Many of the questions stemmed from the RFP requirements and terms and conditions adapted to the agile approach, as well as the influx of interested vendors that are new to state government IT procurements.
"Considering the importance of the CWS-NS effort and the precedence of this new approach, we wanted to take the necessary time to ensure this procurement yields a highly qualified vendor capable of delivering the digital services required by California’s child welfare services practice."
Boule noted that the contract award announcement for the project's other module, the Legacy Application Programming Interface (API), remains on track to occur before the end of May.
The agile procurement and development of CWS-NS — perhaps unprecedented for a project of its size in California state government was initially announced in November 2015. Dozens of vendors participated in a kickoff meeting in December for the CWS-NS procurement.
State officials have said they expect there to be changes and lessons learned as the state adopts the agile model.
