Learns_Pre-proposal_Conference_Notes_FINAL.pdf

Learns Pre-Proposal Conference Notes Hanoi, March 08, 2019

AGENDA

● Opening Remarks

● General Information/Overview of RFP

● Technical Information

● Contract Type

● Proposal Preparation

● Evaluation/Award

● Next Steps

● Q&A

OPENING REMARKS

Michael Capobianco, Director, Office of Acquisition and Assistance (OAA), Contracting Officer Welcome to USAID Learns pre-proposal conference. This is an opportunity for us to deliver detailed information about our RFP and our requirements. This is great opportunity for you to ask questions. This is also an opportunity for you to make suggestions to us to make changes to the RFP. Every suggestion you give us, we will take it very seriously and we have made drastic changes to other RFPs in the past based on the feedback we got from pre-proposal conferences. And this is also an opportunity for you to network if you want to. If we can’t answer a question now, we’ll go back, put together a written answer and post it online.

Christine Gandomi, Deputy Director, Program Development Office (PDO): Thanks everyone for being here. The timing for Learns is great for a number of reasons. So I would like to provide a bit of context for what this new support mechanism will be coming into:

● The Mission has grown significantly over the last few years. It’s a full-fledged mission. We’re not like Nepal, where USAID has been around for years. We are still relatively new in Vietnam.

The mission has been growing and our budget and staffing have grown. In FY18, we had a 20% increase in staff. We’re becoming a bigger mission.

● We’ve just kick-started the new Country Development Cooperation Strategies (CDCS) process, to develop the new 5-year strategy. According to new guidance from Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL), it’s a compressed process to be done in 8 months; it used to take Missions 12 to 18 months to develop new strategy. By the end of October, hopefully, we’ll have a new 5-year strategy. Learns, with an anticipated award date of mid- July, will be coming in as we reach in Phase 3 of the CDCS development process, and basically will be the main support for helping us to implement the new strategy over the next five years. The timing is great and Learns will play critical role in this new strategy.

● When Washington revised Program Cycle Policy in 2016, ADS 201, Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) became a core requirement. The Mission is taking CLA very seriously.

While M&E is a big component of this contract, we want to expand our CLA practices. As we think about how we become more of a learning organization, how we’re more in tune with what’s going on the ground, Learns will provide a lot of support on this.

● This contract is going to be a part of the PDO team, we really see this as being integrated into the Mission, integrated into all aspects of the work that we do.

GENERAL INFORMATION/OVERVIEW OF RFP (Slide 4)

Why we are here? We are here to provide more information, to allow you to ask questions, make suggestions and to network, all with the goal of you getting us better proposals. That’s the sole reason we’re doing this. We try to improve the communication between the Government, USAID, and you, industry, our partners. So please take this opportunity to ask any questions you may have or seek clarification or make suggestions. The slides from my presentation and all questions will be posted on FedBizOpps. We have to make sure everyone has the opportunity to see what folks ask and what information we provide. I do understand that sometimes you may have questions that may be very proposal specific, there’s not really much I can do to get around that so just please ask whatever you want to ask, but please note it will be posted.

We are recording, only to help for transcription purpose, to help our note-takers. Anonymity will be maintained. We are in a formal procurement process, so please remember procurement integrity. You can network, put the proposal together, come up with team arrangement, but be aware of procurement integrity.

Overview:

We’re anticipating awarding one single Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF) term type contract for a period of performance of 5 years.

We are using a Statement of Objective (SOO). SOOs have been around since around 1995/6 in the acquisition regulations, but it’s a relatively new thing for USAID. It allows offerors to write your own Performance Work Statements (PWS). PWS and Statement of Work (SOW) are used interchangeably here.

We will be utilizing a job order system, we’ll get into this a little bit more. It’s meant to be a cost control and management control measure to help with CPFF term contract.

We do have some serious Organizational Conflict of Interests (OCI) concerns - because the contractor will become an integrated part of the mission throughout all phases of the Program Cycle.

We have a very aggressive procurement timeline. This RFP was released on March 1, 2019, we expect to award by July 19, 2019. We plan to stick to it and we put dates on the RFP so that you do have ability to plan and understand when things should be coming out. If we start to slip on that procurement timeline, feel free to send me an email and hold us accountable.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION (Slide 6-7)

Purpose: We define Learns as supporting USAID/Vietnam and our partners to be more efficient, effective and transparent in achieving program results through the use of evidence, performance management techniques, and Collaborating, Learning and Adapting practices. As we think about this contract supporting us in implementing the Program Cycle, from strategy design to project design and implementation, activity design, and M&E, the full cycle, we expect Learns will be fully a part of the mission involved in all aspects of that, and supporting the mission along the way to be more effective.

3 key performance objectives:

1. The first is about strengthening MEL systems and CLA for both us and our partners

2. The second is about data utilization - making sure that M&E information feeds back into learning to help improve course correction, adaptation.

3. The third is about collaboration - strengthening collaboration/ coordination opportunities between the Mission, our partners and other stakeholders, including the Government of Vietnam.

These objectives are written broad so that we can do enough things to help support us to reach our development objectives.

There may be questions that we are unable to answer right now since we are still in the strategy design period, such as when we’re making key decisions, what the program will look like, how many different Intermediate Results (IRs) we may support, whether we will have new sectors -- we don’t know yet at this stage, since the process has just started. But this contract will be supporting all of those aspects through the life of the strategy.

Q: Can you clarify whether or not you envision contract staff to be embedded with the mission’s staff and sit in USAID’s office?

A: No, we don’t envision you to be embedded with us but we do envision you to be very close to us, in terms of physical distance from us. Due to security, badging, IT requirements, it’s very difficult for us to have people be embedded in the mission. So you won’t be part of us from that standpoint. You’re not physically in the building but you’re emotionally with us.

Q: Do you envision this activity to support project design, activity design so that the focus is on more than just MEL?

A: Yes. 100%. A side note: along with these three objectives, when we say this is a complete support contract, the contractor will be asked to do things such as an evaluation, monitoring, DQAs, project design, activity design, all the way down to meeting venue arrangement.

Q: How do you get around the perceived OCI with regards to evaluating something you’ve help design?

A: We are not asking contractor to completely and independently design our activities, our projects, that’s not intended, that’s an inherent government function that we will do. But we will ask for support.

That support could be rapid assessments, fact finding, theory of change workshops, helping us thinking through the activity MEL plan, what indicator we support, how do we design an activity that has clear, specific results, that we can achieve. It will be supporting the teams in the design process. You will not be doing the design because that remains within USAID but all the support around that. This still does create from the contractual side, the contractual impaired objectivity OCI, so there is a requirement that the contractor provide a mitigation plan as to how they will deal with that.

CONTRACT TYPE (Slide 8)

We’re using CPFF term type contract, which is utilized when the Government doesn’t know exactly what success is at the end of the contract. We just know we are going to buy a lot of Level of Effort (LOE), a lot of days.

The contractor must work towards the objectives and provide the deliverables in the contract. The deliverables and the end quantifiable measures are provided by you as you’re writing formal work statement.

Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPPF) term type contract is very open-ended. Deliverables that your fee is tied to is only days of effort that you will provide. We are buying around 35 thousand days of LOE. It includes all direct charged labor at the prime and subcontractor levels. It includes everything. This means that if you are direct charging an admin person in the office, that counts towards the 35 thousand days of LOE.

If you’re direct charging the driver, that counts towards the 35 thousand days of LOE. If you have home office support that is purely covered under indirect rate, that does not count towards the LOE. We’ve had solicitations go out previously that tries to exclude certain categories of labor and it gets really complicated for offerors who have different business systems and the suggestion we get is just include everything.

And it does count towards subcontractor level too, direct charge of subcontractor labor. We got a question about consultants. Language in section H of RFP that will be the resultant contract, says unless consultants are employee of your organization, they are subcontractors. You get employee or subcontractor. Consultant is not a third category.

Another question we got is can we provide a ceiling or range for this contract? No, we cannot. We know how much funding we have, we just can’t disclose. We’re precluded by policy from disclosing a range or dollar figures for any LOE type contracts. And it makes sense. If we say this is 50 million dollar or ranges from 45 to 50 million dollars, every person is coming in for 35 thousand days of LOE for between 45 to 50 million dollars. As opposed to somebody who just says I can provide this same amount of LOE for 40 million dollars. This takes away price competition so that’s why we don’t disclose the funding range or ceiling. It’s all for you to say how much it will cost to provide that much LOE.

Payment of fixed fees is another question that we get. Your fixed fee will be paid as portion of the LOE provided for that invoice. For example, if you have 1 million of fixed fee, and in a particular invoice you provide 10% of total LOE, you will receive 10% of your fee, all the way up to the withhold amount, which is required by regulation. If we have 1 million dollar as fee, we will pay all the way up to 9 hundred thousand dollars, and we withhold 1 hundred thousand all the way until basically the contract is closed.

Job order system: It means that we need to have some type of control over what work you’re doing, when you’re doing it and how much it’s costing us. Because as we mentioned you will be integrated and supporting the entire mission and there will be a lot of work you will be doing so we need to have an ability to track it. A job order system is simply an ability for USAID to say “Don’t do any work unless we’ve authorized it via this system”. And it’s a sequentially numbered system, like task orders. You’re required to come up with the system, that’s part of the SOO. We’ve given example of what it could look like but you’re required to come up with what you think is best.

For example, we say we need you to do an evaluation of X program, tell us how much will it cost and how much LOE you are going to provide. You give that to us, we probably haggle a little bit over what we think appropriate and then we sign the job order, which gives you authorization to move forward to do the work.

You cannot expend any money or bill any money to the contract until the job order is in place for that particular work. And it is another level of control to make sure we don’t expend all the LOE or all the ceiling, whatever it may be, within the first two or three years. It’s a check on what we’re doing.

Q: Even organizing an event, we would get a job order for that? Will everything you ask us to do require a job order?

A: Yes. Everything requires a job order. We are going to learn as we go. The idea is that we’re probably going to lump things together. We’ve envisioned that job order 1 will cover core activities: management, office, staffing, key personnel, etc. So we will try to lump as much as we can to keep the numbers down.

PROPOSAL PREPARATION (Slide 9)

Please read section L carefully. This might sound common sense, but we’re already going through one of these types of proposals where we have a SOO, and we’re reviewing the proposals and it’s clear that folks did not read section L. We have provided you with as much information as you need to prepare your proposal and we do hold people accountable to what is required. If you don’t give us something that’s required, it will be a deficiency.

From the technical proposal, you will be writing a PWS (which is synonymous with SOW). We have half a page of instruction on writing a PWS and guidance. It has to look like a section C of a contract. We do not have a specific format, this is your competitive advantage, what you bring to the table. It has to be similar to a Section C - and Section C varies in all USAID’s different contracts. We are going to take that PWS and make it Section C of the contract. We do have some parameters, for example you have to use contractually binding language. It means you don’t say Company X will, may or should do this. It’s all MUST. Your PWS is meant to be a dry read - clear, concise, dry. The contractor must do X, the contractor must do Y. Don’t talk about Learns as a program or don’t talk about your organization, it’s “the contractor”. If you start talking about Learns, it’s no longer being contractually binding since Learns could be a bigger program.

When we’re talking about avoiding proposal specific information. A lot of folks like to reference different sections of the proposals in the PWS. The PWS needs to be a stand-alone document, it needs to be insular, that we can take it out and put it in Section C. It can’t reference “page 30 of the proposal,” for example. You need to provide measurable, quality standards. The RFP doesn’t say quantifiable results because it’s a cost reimbursement type contract, but we do have measurable quality standards. You have to identify what the measurable quality standards are, and we will hold you accountable to them. And we will review them as part of our technical evaluation

Q: Offerors would not necessarily put discrete activities in the PWS because USAID doesn’t know what it wants right now, is it correct ?

A: Yes. We want the PWS to be broad. You are a support contract, you will be called upon to do many different things. We know we can’t prescribe everything immediately, that’s why we have the job order system. It has to be written very broadly. There are other contracts out there that are similar to this. You might be encouraged to look at them.

Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP): We have learnt from our experiences that people don’t understand what a QASP is. A QASP is how USAID will monitor your performance under the PWS to ensure the quality standards in the PWS, which are written by you, are met. There are couples of key things there.

First and foremost it is the actions USAID will take. It’s not the actions the contractor will take. The actions that the contractor will take are actually in the PWS. Section L has talked about what quality control you will have. Quality assurance is for us to look at what you’ve done to make sure you meet the quality standards. It’s not something that you will provide to us, it’s literally what USAID is going to do and what actions we will take to ensure the quality standards are being met, and what consequences will there be if these quality standards are not being met.

We are asking you to come up with that information. You get to write your own Section C, you get to identify your quality standards, how you will meet quality standards, and you’re going to say what USAID will come in and do to ensure these quality standards are being met and if they are not being met what things USAID are able to do as a consequence to you. That’s a lot of power, basically saying, here, write the contract.

And when you give it to us, we will evaluate it and we are going to hold you accountable to it. There is additional guidance in FAR part 46 on QASPs and how the Government structures them. We have identified this as a resource for offerors. It was very clear that those offerors who looked at this guidance in our previous solicitation had a better QASP. Another thing we are looking at the QASP is how realistic is it for USAID to do what you’ve said we are going to do. It’s important to also have reasonableness, so bear in mind when you’re putting this together, you have to balance the need to ensure that quality standards are being met with the available resources and constraints USAID has.

Management and Staffing (M&S) Plan: This ties back to PWS. We don’t know what we’re going to want yet, that’s why we are using job order system. But staffing plan is critical because we need to know how you’re going to respond and how you are going to staff the contract to meet our requirements. Are you going to take a month to field staff, or 2 weeks? What staff do you have on hand? What’s your rolodex like? How you are going to provide USAID with random technical experts, for instance for dioxin? It also includes key personnel. We’re also letting you choose what key personnel you have, and I’m talking about the positions themselves, not just individuals. All we have mandated is a Chief of Party (COP), single point of contact for USAID. And it’s critical. We are requiring COP to speak for and bind the Contractor. And that’s very hard requirement we have. We’re 12 hours different to the US.. We do not have the ability, especially with the need to be agile and flexible and responsive to USAID’s requirements, to make the requests and then wait a day and half because the COP is not able to commit anything and has to go back to the home office. We’ve had that issue before. We do not like it. The COP is the only position we are mandating.

The other two positions that are key personnel are up to you to identify their roles and responsibilities and their minimum qualifications. While we mandate the COP role and responsibility, you get to identify the minimal qualifications.

Q: When we’re writing the Management & Staffing plan, we’re not writing it like a SOW for the contract, so we can say things like the name of our firm, etc?

A: Correct. You can use proposal specific language there.

PROPOSAL PREPARATION (Slide 10)

In the section M, we’ve told you how we differentiate your technical proposals. The evaluation criteria are what our Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC) team will evaluate you against. For example, the realism of the QASP. You need to keep in mind that USAID will be looking at how realistic it is to be implemented.

Proposals need to be written in English.

You are limited to 35 pages. Everything is included in the page limitations - dividers, letters of commitment, CVs, title page, everything is included. We do this for a very specific reason, it’s to be kind to our technical evaluators. They are reading many of these in a very compressed timeline. If you give them 100 pages, we don’t get a meaningful evaluation and differentiation between offerors. We want to keep it short, concise, to the point. We think 35 pages are enough for you to tell USAID what you’re going to do and how you’re better.

If there are more than 35 pages, we will cut off after the 35th page. It’s a hard limit of 35 pages.

When doing analysis of PWS, QASP and Management & Staffing plan, we want there to be meat, not regurgitating what USAID put out in the RFP. That’s why we have SOO and we’re giving you the ability to write the stuff.

Q: There is no discrete section for capabilities or institutional information to indicate where the organization is better and different than other offerors.

A: You can put it in Management & Staffing plan if you’d like, but that is up to you and counts towards your page limit.

BUSINESS PROPOSAL PREPARATION (Slide 11)

Business proposal must be completely separate from technical proposal. Don’t mention your price or any cost in your technical proposal. We want to make sure that we look at technical proposal solely for technical, and not for anything other than technical evaluation criteria listed in Section M.

Past performance is part of the business proposal. Past performance is not a technical factor. The TEC is not evaluating it, OAA is rating it and we’re using a confidence rating system.

Q: What is a confidence rating system for past performance?

A: In FAR Part 15, there are 3 things for best value procurement that the USG has to evaluate: (1).

cost/price, (2). Quality of product/ service, the technical stuff, (3). past performance unless the CO determines that it’s not applicable for this particular acquisition. It is applicable in this case. And there are three separate things. Past performance is how well you did on your previous government contracts.

You don’t need a technical expert to look at a Contractor Performance Assessment Report (CPAR) to see whether or not a contractor did well in previous Government contracts, what issues or praises were identified. How we translate that into a meaningful evaluation? A lot of times we’ve done it as pass/fail, because we’re not necessarily confident in the quality of the CPAR in that particular segment of program that we’re looking at contracting for. For example, if we’re doing an EG program of X dollars, we are not sure that there is going to be a lot of relevant past performance out there so we move it to a pass/ fail.

Here, this is a support contract, we are relatively sure that there is a lot of these out there, so it’s appropriate to move into a confidence rating system to meaningfully evaluate past performance. So we review your past performance information and then provide a confidence rating, per the RFP. And that get put into the source selection decision.

Q: If we have CPAR, do we include past performance? How does OAA look at CPARs, do you look at all of them, does the offeror have the ability to say look at this one and not this one?

A: No, the offeror does not have the ability to tell USAID which past performance to use. USAID wants to look at all relevant, recent past performance. The OAA team will determine what we consider to be relevant past performance and they will then select these within the CPARs. The system has an advanced tool that allows us to put in dollar values, key words, organizations, period of performance time to give us a snapshot of what CPARS are there, and then we look at all of those that are considered relevant.

Everything else with Business proposal is relatively standard.

Cost: We provide you a budget template. You have to use our budget template. It helps us evaluate and move things forward. If you are using the same template we then can compare. The technical evaluators are not comparing offerors to offerors, but when we are doing cost, we are. When putting together costs, please remember the specific requirements in Section H, especially with regards to consultants, they are subcontractors and if they are classified as subcontractors you have to calculate that accordingly per your indirect cost rate agreement.

OCI: We did an analysis and there is significant potential for OCIs to occur coming out of the work here.

We have to identify what we are going to do to address those. OCIs usually fall into 1 of 3 buckets:

(1) Unequal access to non-public information: you, through the performance of the contract have access to information that you could then use to give yourself an unfair competitive advantage in future acquisition. Or you can access to data of other partners. We know this will happen because you will have access to USAID information and other partners’ information. To address other partners’ information, there is a clause in the contract that says you will have to negotiate an agreement with that partner on how you will use that information. And you are bound by that agreement. That clause does not cover USAID information. You will have access to procurement plans for example, you have access to project design schedule, you will know what’s coming up before everyone does. To address that, there is a requirement for those in the competitive range or the apparent successful offeror if we do not do have competitive range to submit an OCI mitigation plan, addressing how you will deal with unequal access to information: what firewalls are you going to create, what reporting systems you are going to institute into your organization to prevent for example information from flowing from field to proposal writers. We do not have a sample of OCI mitigation plan, because it’s very organization specific. There is a vast array of what the Government will look at when reviewing a mitigation plan. The Air Force does a good job of this. If you want to, look what they look at. That plan has to be approved before the contract is awarded. If we can’t come to agreement on the plan, you are no longer eligible for an award. This is a go/no go decision and it is a hard stop.

(2) Impaired objectivity: Though performance of its work, the contractor is put into a position where it is unable to give unbiased advice to the government, or the advice is compromised. This is whether you’re evaluating your competitors or you’re evaluating yourself. There is clause that deals with this and that says you are precluded from competing in any evaluation that you’ve done that results in any recommendations for 18 months. Regardless of what you call it, an assessment or strategic overview or an evaluation. If you provide solid recommendations that are actionable, and that lead to this informing into the SOW, you’re precluded for 18 months. In addition to that, as part of the mitigation plan, if your organization (when we look at OCI we look at the entire corporate entity, your parents, subsidiaries and affiliates) currently has an award with USAID/Vietnam, you’ll have to provide information as to how you’ll mitigate the impaired objectivity. Because at a certain point of time, you may be asked to evaluate that program.

(3) Biased ground rules: This occurs when an organization, consciously or not, has been put in a situation where it has the ability to set the competitive playing field for competition for an acquisition. For example, you do an evaluation, you make recommendations, these go into a SOW, you have been put into a position where you were able to write those recommendations to your organization’s core competencies. It’s not whether you did do this, it’s whether you had the ability to do so, and if you had the ability to do so, the harm is presumed to have already occurred.

There is no way to address biased ground rules with a mitigation plan. And for USAID to make sure we get everything we want in this contract, we have instituted a blanket preclusion. Whoever the contractor is is precluded from competing at the prime or subcontractor level for anything coming out of Vietnam for the life of the contract, with the exception of the follow-on contract should it occur. This applies only to the prime and subcontractors are dealt with on a case-by-case basis. We have put this in, because sometimes we ask a contractor to do something and then they say they don’t want to do it because they want to bid on the contract. We can’t have this happen in this contract. We need flexibility, responsiveness, we need to get USAID what it needs.

Q: At what point in time for the mitigation plan do we make the go/ no go decision?

A: It comes at the award phase. Should there be a competitive range, we’re asking folks to submit mitigation plan at that point, because now we want you to focus on writing your technical proposal. Then we’ll evaluate them there. If there is no competitive range, then it will be the apparently successful offeror that gives us the plan, and at that point in time e, before signing the award, the plan must be approved. If we can’t come to an agreement, that offeror will no be longer eligible for the award.

Q: Does the biased ground rules also cover USG with large or only USAID?

A: It’s only USAID.

Q: Regarding blanket preclusion, what is the duration for preclusion for programs coming from Vietnam?

A: It’s for the life of the contract, 5 years. It has been suggested to adjust this to 5 years plus 1 year.

We’re looking into that, if we do, we’ll issue an amendment, but right now at a minimum it will be 5 years, the life of the contract.

Q: On blanket preclusion, what about existing engagements?

A: This is covered under the impaired objectivity.

PROPOSAL PREPARATION (Slide 12)

Proposals must be submitted to Michael Capobianco and Huyen Dang electronically. Do not submit zipped files as we can’t access them and attachments must be submitted in Adobe or MS office.

Proposals must be received no later than 4pm Hanoi time, April 1st, 2019. If a proposal is received by Huyen or Michael by closing date and time, it is considered on time. We ask that you send it to both of us, just in case one of us misses it. The closing date and time is when USAID receives it, not when you hit the send button. So if you wait until 3:59PM to send it to us, there’s a chance that it doesn’t come to USAID server until 4:01PM, then it’s considered late and we cannot evaluate it. Please don’t wait until the last minute.

When you send us your proposal, we have no problem if you want to confirm with us that your proposal has been received on time, and we will get back to you.

EVALUATION/AWARD (Slide 13)

We have three technical evaluation criteria, PWS, QASP, Management and Staffing Plan. We will convene a TEC comprised of USAID personnel (or at least a majority of USAID personnel), we have ability to bring in outside parties. They will evaluate proposals against these evaluation factors. At the same time, OAA will start a price/cost evaluation. We are required to do a price analysis and cost realism analysis. Once we get a final memo from the TEC, we will then give the Cost proposals to the TEC so they can match the cost proposal to the technical proposal to identify if your proposed costs match what you propose to do technically. So for example, if you say you’ll have 100 staff sitting around waiting to respond to USAID’s needs, but you only have one staff budgeted, then we will adjust the cost accordingly and run it through your indirect cost rate as well to raise your proposed costs. Cost realism analysis is meant for USAID to adjust costs up or down. The cost realism analysis will get to the most probable cost which will be used for the source selection decision.

We then will do a past performance evaluation and we come up with confidence rating for your organization. All that gets compiled, three sources of information: technical, cost and past performance, we make an award decision or competitive range decision. We already provide the relative weight of the non-cost/ price issues that are significantly more important than price/ cost factors.

Q: Seems like so much of the criteria is based on capacity, past performance and success of the bidders.

How much are you interested in the approaches that they are proposing to carry out the work, if they have unique idea of, for example, building communities of practice, stakeholder engagement, CLA, etc. Is that going to be addressed in the proposal and how if so?

A: It’s all in the PWS. If you want to create a community of practice, and you think this is your competitive advantage, ostensibly, I’m not suggesting you do this, it’s up to you, you’d put this into your PWS: “The Contractor must create a community of practice of practice that does X, Y, Z.”

Q: If you propose something in your PWS and USAID doesn’t like it, how will that work?

A: That’s part of the evaluation process, part of the risks that you are taking with great freedom. You have the ability to propose things. For example, you propose, Contractor must create a community of practices that does XYZ. USAID evaluates it and assigns a weakness, we don’t like it because of XYZ and we think it appreciably raises the risk of unsuccessful contract performance. If your organization is in the competitive range, then we’ll enter into discussions. And discussions are mandated by regulations that they have to be meaningful. And for these types of awards, using SOO, having you write your own PWS, we don’t just send you written documents saying what we like and don’t like, and require you to fix it.

We’ll have a conversation. Discussions are tailored to the individual organization’s proposal and then after discussions, you rewrite it and resubmit to us.

Q: Relating to the QASP, which is not part of the PWS, so we don’t have to talk in MUST language, or do you expect us to talk in MUST language, about how we will ensure quality for our work, and steps you will take to ensure our quality, and how you will decide if something doesn’t meet our quality, i.e. does the QASP need to meet contractually binding language?

A: Remember, it’s not what you’re going to do. It’s meant to be what USAID will do. What you will do to ensure quality standards are met are actually in the PWS, this is your quality control. The QASP is what USAID will do after that or in addition to that to ensure quality is being met. That does not have to be in contractually binding language, because that does not become part of the contract, but it does become part of USAID’s files. Because we’re utilizing a Performance Based Acquisition, and as it comes from FAR Part 37, we’re required to have the QASP and it will be an internal USAID document.

The QASP is distinctly different than the MEL Plan, but they can have overlap. The QASP is totally internal and focused on the contract’s quality and contract’s deliverables quality, while the MEL plan is more programmatic and measures whether we’re meeting program results.

NEXT STEPS (Slide 14)

Proposals due on April 1, 2019, 4:00PM Hanoi time, don’t hit the send button at 3:59PM.

We will do technical and price evaluation, including past performance.

Then we have negotiations/discussions if we establish a competitive range. We reserve the right to not establish competitive range and go directly to the award without discussion.

We have OCI mitigation plan, award, and you start working.

We have very tight and aggressive timeline. We will get notes and answers to Q&A out up on FedBizOpps (https://www.fbo.gov/) no later than Wed March 13, 2019 COB.

https://www.fbo.gov/

There is specific date in the solicitation about when you will be notified about a competitive range.

Q&A

Q: In the RFP, under past performance, there is a mention about the PPIRS forms, and in it major subcontractors are mentioned. There is confusion whether the $10-40M applies to subcontractors or the prime?

A: The $10-40M range applies to the Prime. We’ve removed the requirement for major subcontractors.

Q: If an organization is implementing a USAID project in Vietnam, are they eligible for this work?

A: Yes, however if you make it to the competitive range stage, you will be required to submit an OCI mitigation plan that addresses how you will deal with impaired objectivity issues associating with evaluating or dealing with your own program.

Q: You made reference to a driver earlier. What is USAID’s expectation about where activities will be conducted?

A: The reference to a driver was regarding LOE. As to where we expect the work to be performed, we expect the majority of work to be conducted in Hanoi. Because of the integral nature of how the contractor will be working with our program team, we expect them to be very close to USAID, physically. In addition to work in Hanoi, you’ll also be tasked with working where our other projects are (including Bien Hoa, Ho Chi Minh City and other provinces throughout Vietnam). We also have a satellite office in HCMC and have about 5 USAID people who sit at and work from the consulate there.

Q: Are there limitations or expectations on the percentage of work to be conducted by the prime versus the subcontractor?

A: There currently is not. However, there is a provision in the RFP on limitations of unnecessary past-through charges. You’re required when submitting your proposal to notify USAID very clearly in your cost proposal if the subcontract work will exceed 70% of the total estimated cost. Once you notify us, that kicks in another layer of analysis that we have to do.

Q: Getting registered in Vietnam is difficult if you don’t currently work here. How do you envision that could affect the start up of this, and is mission prepared to assist in any way?

A: Being registered and getting official project approval (the Government of Vietnam calls ODA project approval) are two different things. You can be registered as an organization operating in Vietnam and not have project approval for a specific project that you are working on. Registration is, from my understanding, from discussions with partners, less of a burden. The issue is the project approval process.

Both of these are the responsibility of the partner. With regards to project approval, USAID will assist working with you and the cognizant government ministry that you’ll work under to help out.

This is a strong sovereign government with Decree 16 on ODA regulation. They have a managing agency which is a Government institution and project owner and when we work to develop project, we try to identify who the project owner will be and how we will engage with them during the project design.

Q: Can we implement without registration, even if you can implement without project approval?

A: I don’t know. Even if you could, I can’t tell you that you can. Because that would be USAID saying you could operate outside of the laws of Vietnam, which we can’t. We have to obey the host country’s laws. So if the law requires you to be registered to operate, then you need to be registered.

Q: Do you have a sense of the average duration for project registration?

A: We’re mostly tracking project approval. Usually our partners are tracking registration. Normally, it takes 15 days.

Q: Does 35 page limit on technical proposal include Letters of commitment? If yes, does that imply that letters of commitment don’t go in business plan? So Letters of commitment are not expected in the business proposal?

A: Yes, they are included in the 35 page limit. It includes everything. You can put whatever you want in the technical proposal, you have 35 pages. With great freedom, comes great risk and responsibility. You can put in the your technical proposal what you think will be best, what the Government wants to see - as long as you’re addressing the minimum things (PWS, QASP, M&S Plan), you can include anything you want in there.

Q: Is there an existing legacy system?

A: Last year we had AIDTracker+ (AT+) and it was shut down to have a new system. We are planning to roll out the new system, Development Information Solution (DIS), next fiscal year.

Q: The Mission has been undergoing a period of growth and lots of support needed. Should we formulate the technical proposal with the understanding that the mission size is the same or growing as well?

A: Given where we are, we’ve experienced a massive growth spurt over recent years. I would expect that we would continue to see incremental growth, but not to the levels of the jump we’ve seen in the past two years. The growth occurred mostly in support functions – Human Resource, Finance, etc. Program office hasn’t grown in the past two years, but if it were to grow, it would be one or two more people. We also had a 50% jump in our Operating Year Budget (OYB) from $80M to $120M.

We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, we don’t know what we need, what services we will need, and what our new strategy will say. We will need the contractor to be highly responsive to the shifting changes to occur. So being flexible and adaptable, being able to build in responsiveness will be absolutely key to the success of this.

AGENDA