Questions_and_Answers_Amended1.pdf

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

# RFP Section # / Page # Question Government Response

1 General Could you please tell me if this is a new requirement?

It is not a new requirement

2 General Could you please tell me if there is a current or previous contractor who has performed similar services? If available, can you please send along the incumbent contract or task order number?

That information is publically available.

3 General Is this opportunity open to all small businesses, or is it set-aside for SDVOSB, HUBZone, WOSB, SDB, and 8(a) businesses only?

As stated on page one in the solicitation; “is set-aside for Small Businesses”

4 General How many CRs a month for FPRS, NDB, and other programs in total?

We average roughly 15 new CRs created each month, and we average 12 CRs deployed.

This count INCLUDES the PDCRs (database changes as specified in the PWS).

This count does not include ad hoc data requests and other more minor tasks. These are the formal CRs prioritized by the monthly CCB.

5 General Under this contract, the Contractor shall deliver, furnish for Government use, or furnish for Contractor use at a Federally controlled facility, only imaging equipment that, at the time of submission of proposals and at the time of award, was EPEAT® bronze-registered or higher.

Question: Does the contractor have to provide a statement that our imaging equipment off-site is EPEAT® bronze-registered or higher?

N/a, see amended solicitation.

6 General If we have a subcontractor that is service disabled, woman owned or 8(a), will we be reviewed based on the existing competitive basis first eligibility established by USDA?

The competition is for the Prime only.

7 General Would you consider a customer CPAR in lieu of USDA PPQ?

No

8 General Was any discontinuation of the work due to budget constraint this year

No

9 General Please confirm that the 30 page limitation is double spaced and includes all three sections (technical approach, management approach, and past performance) in the technical quote.

Single spaced. See amended solicitation.

10 General Is past performance excluded from the page count?

Yes, see solicitation, past performance questionnaires are emailed separately.

11 General Are there page limits for the technical and management approaches?

Yes, see solicitation. The technical approach and management approach both make up the Technical Quote that is limited to 30 pages within Volume I.

12 Can the Government clarify the intended acquisition strategy for this procurement?

Is it a total small business set-aside?

Yes

13 On page 51 of 85 of the RFP states that “AGAR 452.237-74 - Key Personnel (Feb 1988) (a) The Contractor shall assign to this contract the following key personnel:” and it has been left blank.

Will the Government provide a list of key personnel for this procurement?

Project Manager QA/BA Lead

DBA

Network Administrator

14 Could you please let us know the contract value/ FTE count and Incumbent information (if any)?

No

15 Based on the System Design Document (dated 2011), it is assumed that the initial version of .NET was 3.5. What version of .NET are FPRS and NDB built on?

4.0

16 What tools are used for Requirements Management, Defect Management, Project Management, Risk & Issue Management, and Action Item Management?

Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Microsoft Project

17 Please describe the release cadence for each system in terms of timing.

Typically release every 2 months to production

18 In which system(s) are the other grants functions such as submission and review performed?

FPRS is the system used by grantees for submission of required program and financial reports

19 1.2.3 Is the forms management engine custom or some 3rd party tool? If a 3rd party tool, which one?

Custom

21 2.2.3 Does USDA FNS have an existing Disaster Recovery capability or does one have to be created?

One is being created in the Microsoft Azure Cloud

22 Sec M, criteria 1 USDA FNS mentions supporting the application in a third party cloud environment. Which cloud provider is currently being used?

Microsoft Azure

23 Has system performance diminished over the life of the system that a technology refresh should be considered?

No

24 1.2.5 There is a reference to Figure 3 which does not exists. Is this a reference to Figure 2 or is there a missing figure and is the information in that figure pertinent to the response beyond what is already documented in the SOW and other documents?

Reference to Figure 3 should be removed. Information can be gleaned from PWS

25 1.3 Are the non-production hosting environments currently located at a vendor site or vendor managed data center in Alexandria or at FNS Headquarters?

They are currently in process of being moved to Microsoft Azure Cloud

26 2.2 Per the statement “Operation and maintenance of software tracking systems”

– it was our assumption that the software is managed/tracked through Sourcesafe/TFS which is a COTS product.

Some maintenance and administration of TFS is required. One other project utilizes a TFS instance. TFS

Is there another system which needs to be Maintained?

server administration at a very high level is required.

27 2.2 (r) Is TFS the current Requirements, Source and Defect management system? In other documents provided, Sourcesafe was indicated as the source control system.

Should we assume that this has been migrated to TFS?

Yes, TFS is the system for all.

28 5.0 Per the statement ‘ … USDA FNS will provide …. Including development, quality assurance …. Etc… ‘ – How many environments are currently implemented?

There will likely be seven (7):

Prod, Pre-prod, Pilot, Help Desk, Integration, Dev, and DR. Pre-prod and Help Desk could exist as one.

29 For all existing documentation, what repository is used to manage these? Do you have a content management system such as Sharepoint for this or are all documents (as indicated in the SOW) stored in a file share environment?

Microsoft TFS

30 What is the current number of contractor staff supporting FPRS and NBD?

See Answer 14

31 2.0, 2.1 Regarding “The Government anticipates that the nature of the total work performed will be O&M, however if in the future, when Development of major enhancements to FPRS or NDB is needed, then FNS will issue a separate request. FNS considers enhancements as major changes to the Agency systems such as; a) Business process re-engineering b) System modernization for either FPRS/NDB c) consolidating FPRS and NDB into a single system d) System redesign of FPRS or NDB etc” Does a separate request mean a new procurement or does it mean a contract modification?

Contract Modification with additional funding

What Technology is FPRS (forms generated use predefined metadata properties) written in?

.NET 4.0, C#

Could the Gov’t please provide more information on FPRS, are all 185 versions still used?

Forms and submissions are always subject to revision, even years later. All 185 versions are theoretically needed.

34 14 How many Ad-hoc CR process requests in a month?

Less than 1 per month

35 15 How many production database change requests?

Varies. 1-8 per month

36 N/A How many emergency releases per month?

Less than 1 per year over the last 5 years

37 N/A Can personnel work on the appropriate performance standards?

Please restate

38 63 Could the Gov’t please provide the Basis Estimate?

No

What is the WBSCM program? Who is currently working on this program?

Web-Based Supply Chain Management. An external agency is responsible for the WBSCM system. FPRS needs to retrieve commodity price information from WBSCM weekly.

Could the Gov’t please provide Figure 3 as referenced in Section 1.2.5.?

Reference to Figure 3 was erroneously included

N/A

What development work is being performed and what type of system is used?

C#, .NET, Microsoft Visual Studio and TFS

42 General Is there an existing service level agreement for user support requests?

SLA is in the performance standards

43 General Do either the FPRS or NDB systems manage PII or other sensitive data?

No PII. Data is SBU

44 General Can you provide more detailed information about the current hosting configuration(s) for the FPRS and NDB systems? Are there any anticipated changes to the hosting environments before work begins on this contract?

Unfortunately, the environments are currently being migrated from being hosted at FNS HQ in Virginia to Microsoft Azure Cloud. Schedule slippage makes a go-live date impossible to predict, but the target is before contract award.

45 General Will all system, user, and training documentation be up-to-date by contract award?

Yes

46 RFP Section 2.0 Scope of Work, 2.2 Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Support for FPRS and NDB, Page 16

What software does the existing help desk use to track support inquiries?

Microsoft TFS

47 RFP Section 2.0 Scope of Work, 2.2 Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Support for FPRS and NDB, Page 16

Can you provide more information about what regular training activities for both systems will look like (the amount of staff to be trained, the frequency of trainings, in person or remote, etc.)?

Variable. Sessions can be 5 or so people, but live webinars can have 100+ remote participants.

Training only occurs 2-5 times per year.

48 RFP Section 2.0 Scope of Work, 2.2.3 NDB O&M Support, "The Contractor shall provide Database Administration (DBA) services for the NDB system, including monitoring the servers;

however, the Contractor will not have direct or administrative access to the production environment." Who has access to/is responsible for maintaining the production environment? Will the government consider granting the awardee access to the production environment?

Technically, FNS OIT has administrative access to all servers. It is possible and likely for contractor staff to obtain privileged accounts, with groups having admin access to prod servers.

49 RFP Section 5.0 Operating Constraints, G - Contract, Page

"The Contractor shall conduct the transition-in using the methodology provided in the Transition-In plan." Will the government/outgoing contractor provide the aforementioned Transition-In Plan?

Does the outgoing contractor have a transition out period, and will this overlap with the awardee's transition in?

Transition-In Plan will have to be created depending on the migration to the cloud. There will be an overlapping transition period if the incumbent is not the awardee

What is the status and schedule for data center migration (from FNS VA data center to another location)?

It is in progress. There are a couple of showstopping issues at MS Azure. The goal is to be migrated by contract award, but that may not happen.

11-12

Will the contractor be required to coordinate through a third party (e.g.

another contractor) for changes or deployments on pre-production and production environments?

Unknown at this time. Cloud migration is not completed, so the true relationship with Microsoft is not entirely known.

It is likely the awardee will have access to all environments for deployments and changes for the immediate future.

Can FNS describe the design or provide more information about the characteristics of the NDB data warehouse?

SQL Server with 4 dimensions

53 14 How is data exchanged between FPRS and NDB?

Nightly database jobs transform and move data

Section 1.2.3 references a Figure 3 that depicts the relationship between FPRS and NDB. Can FNS provide this artifact?

Figure reference was erroneously included

Can FNS share or characterize examples of upcoming non-major enhancements that would be within the scope of this O&M effort?

Adding a new instance of the SF-425 for a newly awarded grant. Substantive changes to the FNS-759

The list of O&M support subtasks (a-r) omits the letter j. Please confirm that this the complete list or whether there is a missing task.

This is the complete list. The lettering is in error.

Can FNS provide an estimate of how many CRs per month for FPRS, NDB, and other programs the contractor may support?

6-10 for FPRS and NDB total, 3- 5 for all other systems

58 16 What tools are used by the Help Desk and/or to manage requirements (e.g. Jira)?

Microsoft TFS

Does FNS prescribe or prefer a specific development methodology (e.g. Agile), and if so, are there preferred tools or what tools are in place to support the desired methodology?

Agile is appreciated, but no one method is required. FNS would prefer to continue using Visual Studio, .NET, C#, and TFS

Can FNS provide the technology stack (including current software versions) for

FPRS?

SQL Server 2016, Visual Studio 2017 Pro and Enterprise, Windows Server 2016, OfficeWriter 11.0, Robohelp 11

Can FNS provide the technology stack (including current software versions) for

NDB?

SQL Server 2016, Visual Studio 2017 Pro and Enterprise, Windows Server 2016, OfficeWriter 11.0, Robohelp 11

22 Where is the Disaster Recovery (DR) site and environment located?

Currently in FNS Southwest Regional Office, but in process of being built in Azure Cloud

63 59 What is the requested validity period for the offeror's proposal?

45 Days

63 Will FNS provide a list of key personnel roles or should offerors propose key roles?

Project Manager QA/BA Lead

DBA

Network Administrator

65 Will native Microsoft Word versions of cited PDF documentation be supplied?

No

What tool is used for version control?

Code is developed in Visual Studio, versioning handled with Microsoft TFS

67 What IDEs and versions are required to support applications?

Microsoft Visual Studio 2017

What are specific programming languages in use for both FPRS and NDB applications?

C#

Is there an architecture or topology diagram for FPRS and NDB applications?

Attached is a recent topology.

Updates will be needed once Cloud migration is completed

Can FNS share the current requirements inventory and design documentation for FPRS and NDB?

No.

71 Will FNS make the system available to Offerors for demonstration/inspection?

No

Please clarify if the offeror is required to include the continuation sheets when submitting the SF 1447?

Yes

Assuming answers are provided on June 21, the solicitation timeline provides offerors only one week to recover before proposals are due. In light the breadth of information requested, and if the procurement schedule can accommodate, would FNS consider a modest extension to the due date, to perhaps July 8 or 9.

Yes