CTE_Challenge_Webinar_Transcript.doc

PSC ED OVAE

Moderator: Stephan Scheffer

06-11-14/1:00 pm CT

Confirmation # 6664290

PSC ED OCTAE

Moderator: Albert Palacios June 11, 2014

1:00 pm CT

Coordinator:

Welcome and thank you all for standing by. All participants' lines are open. Please mute your line when not speaking. If you do not have a mute function key, you may press Star and then 6 to mute or unmute your phone. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this point.

Now, I will turn the meeting over to your host, Mr. Albert Palacios. Sir, you may begin.

Albert Palacios:

Thank you and welcome, everybody, to the conference call. We're glad to hear or see all of the interest in this procurement. With me in the room is Steve Scheffer, the Contracting Officer, with our Contracting Office here at Education, along with Heather Watroba, our Contract Specialist.

Just as a reminder, please mute your phones to reduce noise on the line. We will provide time at the conclusion for you to ask questions verbally through the phone line or in text form through the chat function.

At this point, we'll go ahead and get started with the presentation. So I'll turn it over to Steve.

Steve Scheffer:

Thanks, Albert. As Albert said, my name is Steve Scheffer and I am the Contracting Officer for this opportunity at the Department of Education for the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education (or OCTAE). This is one of the early steps in our market research efforts to identify potential commercial companies with the technical capability to meet our operational requirements for this new procurement. Today, Albert is going to be sharing with you a fairly high level summary of the performance work statement and the specific tasks that will be required to be performed to support this new procurement.

In addition to providing an overview of the requirement, we ask that you listen to identify any barriers to competition. We also ask that you provide comments that you might have regarding the two draft statements of work that we included in the FedBizOpps notice. We also identified our intent to enter into a single-award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract against which orders will be placed. This structure will make better sense to you after hearing Albert's description of the requirement.

We also ask that you provide any input or any suggestions, recommendations you have regarding the two performance work statements and, for those of you who elect to respond to the Sources Sought Notice, to please adhere to the guidance that is provided in the FedBizOpps notice regarding page limits to the responses and content for the responses. For example, we're very much interested in the business sizes of the companies who respond to this Sources Sought Notice.

The Department is also interested in what GSA contracts you might hold that would be applicable to be used for this opportunity and again, as I mentioned earlier, any barriers that you see to competition.

Another benefit, hopefully, by participating in this webinar is to identify other interested parties who may have experiences and skills complementary to your own so that you can explore the feasibility of partnering to ensure you are able to meet all of the operational requirements identified in the performance work statement.

As Albert mentioned, there will be time at the end of the presentation for questions and answers either through the conference coordinator or through posting questions to the actual webinar.

Steve Scheffer:

Written responses will be due by 12:00 pm on June 17, 2014. The responses should be submitted electronically to Heather Watroba with copy to Steve Scheffer.

Albert Palacios:

Thanks, Steve. So now, we'll get into a little bit more about what we're looking for in the capability statement. The overarching concept is that we're looking for a thought partner as it relates to challenges and competitions related to career and technical education. We really want to see commercial industry experience and best practices for conducting national challenges and competitions at a national or global scale and to see how you have been able to successfully reach the objectives of those challenges.

And as it says on the slide, we're not expecting the contractor to be the developer. If you are a developer of applications and platforms and simulations and some of the tasks that are included in this procurement, you may want to pass on this opportunity to avoid any conflicts and preserve your rights to continue to pursue procurement opportunities as a developer of applications, platforms and simulations. The purpose and focus of this procurement is to the group of contractors that assists in the organization and management of the actual comprehensive challenges.

You will notice in the personnel staffing qualifications that we are looking for an organization that has the skills to help design and manage the challenges that also has the necessary insight into the topics and content of the challenges so that the Department can get the best outcome.

We are also looking to attract contractors with the requisite experience and expertise to act as a hub to connect those experts and audiences, so we're going to look for organizations that have broad reach capability to get to the audience we need to respond to these challenges.

We're looking for companies to describe their capabilities in five task areas that comprise the primary operational requirements stated in the performance work statement for the over-arching IDIQ contract that will include requirements for: (a) design and management of challenges and price competitions; (b) conducting literature and industry scans; (c) conduct outreach and technical assistance; (d) report results and findings; and (e) planning and facilitating events and technical assistance. We'll get into each of those tasks in further detail in a moment.

Here is a little background on Career and Technical Education -- CTE as we call it. CTE provides youth and adults with access to the academic and technical knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in post-secondary education as well as the workforce. We focus on programs that begin in high school and then help the students transition to post-secondary education and provide technical skills that will allow them to enter the work force either right after high school or after obtaining a post-secondary credential.

For more information on what CTE is all about, you can find the information on our Perkins Collaborative Resource Network at cte.ed.gov. CTE or Career and Technical Education is authorized under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 and this project specifically falls under the authority to research, develop and disseminate and build the capacity of CTE programs.

For Task 1, designing and managing price competition we are looking for companies that can help us both conceive and implement the challenges so we're looking to attract organizations that understand the federal environment for conducting a challenge. Ideally, interested parties will include those organizations with experience conducting similar challenges on a national scale and who understand the tools and requirements necessary to deploy a challenge.

The challenge competitions also involve activities such as receiving submissions, developing protocols for reviewing submissions and making recommendations regarding who the Department should consider as the winner(s). Success of these activities is critical to the success of the program as the Department anticipates using the resultant contract to conduct many such challenges.

The Department is most interested in locating organizations that can help us with designing and managing challenges who also understand that the success of each challenge depends a lot on the communications aspects, getting the word out and encouraging and generating enthusiasm and excitement behind each of the challenges.

Task Two is to conduct literature and industry scans to increase the understanding of the specific environments and programming topics and development areas that will provide the foundation for developing the challenges and connecting with different audiences and industries to broaden the benefit from the next generation of advanced technology.

While it's useful to have an understanding of the way things look now, we're really looking for what's next and how we - and how career and technical education - can be delivered by using next generation technology. So as the literature and industry scans are conducted, we're looking to better understand what's been done to date so that we can move forward from that.

Task 3 is to conduct outreach and technical assistance. As I mentioned earlier, there is a strong need in these challenges and competitions to make sure that people know about them and that people get excited about participating so that we receive the most robust set of submissions - collection and submissions and alternative solutions, new ideas and everything along that route.

So we want to make sure that the contractor that we award this procurement to has strong capabilities to conduct outreach as well as to be able to provide technical assistance and, as Steve mentioned, this webinar is a good opportunity for participants to identify perhaps some partners that could complement participants in forming a stronger team to deliver more technical guidance to developers and to the education community on how to develop and integrate these new innovations into career and technical education.

So the offer should have some good experience with understanding how to conduct outreach but also how to deliver technical assistance from programming and development technology to the education community, professional development and other related activities.

Task 4 is to report results and findings. While this is an important task, this isn't one of the primary functions; however, it is important because it will provide a mechanism for collecting the results from these challenges and understanding what worked and what didn’t work during all of these activities. So there may be some scans, results and reports, including the reports on the challenges and reports on other activities that may be conducted under thee tasks that will be awarded under the IDIQ contract.

The last task, Task 5, is for planning and facilitating conferences, events and providing technical assistance. As one of the activities in these sets of task orders, we'll include some events, public events that may, for example, include bringing together developers of applications to provide some technical assistance either on what the challenge is all about or after the challenge has been conducted perhaps further in the development of the application.

Specifically, we're looking at the commercial contractor community that has some experience planning for and conducting some high profile events to showcase some of the new and innovative technologies that we are hoping to derive from these challenges.

One of the initial task order performance work statements focuses on a career counseling challenge that will be attempting to inspire app developers to create career counseling applications on a mobile platform through a competitive challenge or through this competition.

So in doing that, the contractor for this procurement will be responsible for the project management, research of concurrent offerings and designing the competition, coordinating, conducting outreach and administering the competition. Along with those responsibilities, there could be some technical assistance tasks after the award as well as preparing a press release or facilitating a press event or announcement for the award and then conducting outreach to increase awareness of the app. So there are some additional tasks that we would see that might be required depending on available funding and depending on the outcomes of the challenge, and how the strategies of the challenge are implemented.

We're hoping that interested parties will respond to this webinar with their capability statements tailored to meet the requirements summarized today. We want you to describe your relevant experience as it relates to these types of challenges and activities. We are looking for that national and global reach to make sure that interested parties have the requisite experience to conduct these activities. We are not just interested in companies based in the Washington, D.C. area, but also across the country so that we can benefit from attracting participants from all over the country to participate in in these competitions.

We are also hoping that participants on this webinar will think about possibly partnering with other companies to better satisfy all of the performance requirements, including institutions of higher education, high schools, not-for-profit companies, etc. There are a lot of possibilities for partnering to build a team that can best conduct these activities and we're hoping that you can bring to us an innovative example of a partnership that brings in all the key stakeholders.

And back over to you, Steve.

Steve Scheffer:

Okay. Thanks, Albert. As I briefly mentioned at the beginning, our acquisition approach to this procurement is to enter into a single-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (ID/IQ) contract. The estimated period of performance will be 60 months and during that period of time, the Department will issue task orders covering those functional areas and topics that Albert summarized during his part of the presentation.

This is the initial step in our market research to identify which companies may have the technical capability to perform this work and to benefit from whatever feedback we receive from interested parties regarding the scope of work and the approach that we're taking. It is important that your responses to the FBO notice are targeted to this requirement and that's one of the reasons why we limited the pages available to you to respond.

It's not important for you provide resumes, although you may want to spend a little bit of time focusing on or highlighting particular skill sets you believe are unique to what you bring to this solution to providing these services and some of the key members of your team who might be instrumental and helping us achieve the results that Albert summarized.

Also, we request that you provide some information regarding your company, such as business size and any socio-economic small business categories for which your company qualifies. You may also want to identify other companies with whom you plan to team so that we get a better idea regarding the aggregate capability of the combined companies. We also ask that you provide a list of the GSA contracts that you may hold that you believe are applicable to the type of work that we’ve addressed during the webinar today.

As a reminder, the capability statements are due by 12 pm on June 17th. They should be sent electronically to Heather Watroba with copy to me and then we'll coordinate with Albert and other folks within the OCTAE organization to review them. Once we have an opportunity to benefit from the feedback that we've received from all of you and others who may elect to respond to the FBO notice, we may make adjustments to the performance work statement and press on to issue the formal solicitation for this work.

Right now, the plan is that the solicitation will be issued sometime in July. We realize that we need to provide all of you an opportunity to prepare a responsive submission so we want to issue the solicitation as soon as we can to give you that time and also to give the folks on the government side an opportunity to fully review the responses that we get to the solicitation. The intent is to make award prior to the end of the federal government fiscal year.

And now, we're open to any questions that you all might have.

Albert Palacios:

So I'm going to do a little adjustment on the screen so that we can see any questions that may have been typed in. The operator/moderator will provide assistance for submitting your questions verbally or in writing.

Okay. The - it's just an open line for questions so feel free to ask your questions and we'll address them as best we can.

(Evan Barnes):

This is (Evan Barnes) from (RMC) Research. Do you have to be GSA approved contractor to be eligible?

No. I don’t believe so. We may eventually get to a point where we have enough interest and can determine that there would be effective competition among holders of a particular GSA schedule contract, but at this time, we're just trying to identify those commercial companies who have the capability to perform this work.

So we - right now, we're viewing it as full open competition and we haven't made any decision as of yet in how we might change that acquisition approach.

(Evan Barnes):

Thank you.

(Jim Fredericson):

Could you hear me?

Albert Palacios:

Yes.

(Jim Fredericson):

Yes. This is (Jim Fredericson) from (Incentive). If there are not all tasks that we could respond to, could we respond to individual tasks capability?

Coordinator:

Thank you.

Steve Scheffer:

We really need to have one-stop shopping so we will be looking for individual contractors and teams of contractors that can meet all of the performance requirements stated in the performance work statements. That is one of the reasons we mentioned that participants may want to consider partnering with other contractors to better ensure that they can collectively meet the performance requirements.

So we would strongly encourage you to assemble a team with the capability to cover all of the requirements in the tasks Albert summarized.

(Jim Fredericson):

Thank you.

Linda Botts:

Hi. This is Linda Botts from ASHLIN Management Group. How many awards do you anticipate making and will you provide the list of participants to this call so the teaming arrangements can be explored?

Steve Scheffer:

Thank you for your question. The procurement approach we are pursuing at this time is to issue one IDIQ contract. In this way, we will be able to develop the relationship over time that will enable the type of partnership between the Department and the contractor to achieve all of performance requirements that Albert talked about.

We will be issuing a modification to the current FBO notice that will include a copy of the transcript, a list of companies and individuals who submitted RSVPs for this webinar, and a copy of the PowerPoint slide deck that Albert spoke from to summarize the performance requirements of this procurement.

(Evan Barnes):

This is (Evan Barnes) from (RMC) again. One of your last slides, it may have been second or third to the last, listed a number of bullet points. One of those was stating that the IDIQ contract would be fixed price but also, on the slide, I thought I saw something about your preference for two small business primes. Did I misread that?

Steve Scheffer:

Well, we are not anticipating making more than one award; however, like all other federal government agencies, we have goals for small business participation and, based on some preliminary market research that we've done, there appears to be a number of small businesses in this field who may be able to meet our operational requirements.

But we won't really know that until we are able to review the responses we get to the Sources Sought Notice that was posted to FedBizOpps. We will need to confirm that there are, in fact, sufficient numbers of capable small businesses to meet our operational requirements. That is one of the reasons why we asked for business sizes because, if we don’t have a sufficient number of small businesses who seem to have the capability to meet our operational requirements, then we will pursue a procurement that is unrestricted and open to all business sizes, including large businesses.

We intend to issue the first two task orders at the same time that the IDIQ is awarded so there would be immediate work for the contractor to do upon award.

(Evan Barnes):

Okay. So to clarify, right now, your preference is for small business prime contractors, but that the procurement is not yet determined to be a small business set-aside.

Steve Scheffer:

That’s correct.

(Evan Barnes):

All right. Got it.

(Jim Fredericson):

This is (Jim Fredericson) again. In your research of small businesses that are able to do this, could you share the (NAICS) code that you found those under?

Steve Scheffer:

The NAICS code for this procurement will be 541613, Marketing Consulting Services, or something similar.

Albert Palacios:

So we'll clarify that information as soon as we are able to make sure all interested parties are aware of the NAICS code.

Steve Scheffer:

The NAICS code is posted to the FBO notice.

(Jim Fredericson):

All right. Thank you.

Albert Palacios:

We're going to switch real quick to the questions that were delivered via chat and then we'll get back to telephone questions. The first question is “How would you like to receive comments to the performance work statement?”

Steve Scheffer:

The comments regarding the performance work statement do not need to be included in the ten-page limit to the capability statement but should be included with the electronic submission that should be sent to the Contract Specialist, Heather Watroba.

Albert Palacios:

Is there a requirement to be on a GSA - under GSA contract? The question is GSA had the challenge management SIN code. Would there be really any reasons to use any other SIN? Do you want to?

Steve Scheffer:

You can go ahead.

Albert Palacios:

Yeah. We really want to make sure that procurement is as open as possible to many new ideas and new organizations that could provide some innovative solutions, so we are keeping it open for now. However, as Steve mentioned, one of the purposes of this webinar is to identify the best procurement approach for this opportunity. We will identify the approach in the pre-solicitation notice.

Any other comments, Steve?

Steve Scheffer:

I would like to respond to the question regarding the NAICS code. The NAICS code for this procurement is 541613 for Marketing Consulting Services.

(Jim Fredericson):

Thank you.

Albert Palacios:

Tasks 4 and 5 appear to be missing from the PWS. You are correct. My numbering was off and that will be corrected in the final. It did jump from 3 to 6 so we'll make sure that gets corrected. Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

Single award or multiple award? I believe we have stated that it will be a single-award IDIQ contract.

How do we access the different publishing and style guidelines? The .gov sites are currently restricted. When the full procurement comes out, we will be submitting in there a list of links and I thought it was in this one PWS. We will provide electronic copies of the documents for any of the links that do not work.

We certainly want to make sure that any interested party has access to the information that we are making available so that you get the full picture and are able to best respond. We will wait until we get all your comments to provide an updated version of the PWS.

We want to make sure that it does address all of the functional areas and activities that Albert summarized during his presentation today. So I would just keep an eye out for modifications or amendments to the FBO notice that may have an updated draft of the PWS.

Albert Palacios:

And you can sign up for these updates on FBO...

Steve Scheffer:

Yes, if you subscribe to the solicitation.

Albert Palacios:

Let's see. Do you have any particular small business set asides? We've already discussed that. Let's see. Yes. The task force will be from - Has the department conducted challenges in the past? Yes, we have and I can see we can provide the information on that. I believe it was done out of a different office. So I need to get some more details but I will - how would we provide for it?

Steve Scheffer:

We'll have to post it to the notice.

Albert Palacios:

We'll post it to the notice. I believe we have - if we have not, that will also be...

Steve Scheffer:

If it is publically available information, we can provide it.

Albert Palacios:

Yeah. If it's publically available we can provide it. Okay. So there's a question about how past performance will be considered. Is it just a prime small business or the whole team collectively and so - Steve, you - answer that.

Steve Scheffer:

The Federal Acquisition Regulation requires that past performance be considered in all procurements. We will provide offerors an opportunity to provide corporate qualifications that they've acquired through supporting other customers and we also look to the past performance information retrieval system or PPIRS to do our own due diligence regarding past performance.

This will be covered in the solicitation; however, we will most likely like to see most of the past performance information pertained to the prime contractor. However, in the interest of fairness, we will also have some provision for prime contractors to include past performance references for key, significant subcontractors. These types of things will be covered in the Instructions to Offerors in the solicitation.

Albert Palacios:

There's a question asking if we're looking for national and global scale versus just local and that is correct if I understand the question correctly. We're really looking for some national reach. When it comes down to maybe conducting events, there might be some local outreach that needs to be conducted; but for the most part, these are projects that are being done at a national scale.

Is CTE experience by the contractor important? You know, we really want to see the most effective team presented and, while it is important to have an understanding of what CTE is about, we want to make sure that the organization that becomes our thought partner is able to both understand what we're talking about when we talk about CTE, but more importantly, is able to interpret that and connect that to the audiences where it needs to be connected.

In this case, it's more than likely going to be developers and maybe some software organizations, maybe some universities, maybe some high school programs that do programming. There's a variety of organizations that might need to be connected through these activities.

So, specific CTE experience isn't as critical as the evidence and the capability to conduct competitions on a national level.

I think this next question is a similar question to an earlier question. For the first task order – for career counseling - we would expect the contractor to organize and conduct the actual competition, establish a method for evaluating the submissions, and then to disburse the awarded prize amount to the selected developer after approval by the Department. We would expect the contractor to be working with the Department to conceive the competition/challenge and then to actually execute/implement the competition and receive the submissions. The contractor will then help the Department develop the evaluation methodology to the determine the best submission and to recommend the winner(s) to the Department for approval. The Department will make the award decision and authorize the contractor to issue the prize money.

After the competition, there could be some tasks to provide technical assistance to developers and other interested parties - interested in taking that model and expanding and/or adopting it for their local use or alternative uses.

The next question is: “What is the benefit to Department of Education of having a small business prime versus a full-and-open competition, especially if it's a small business partnering with larger firms.

Well, it depends on how dependent the small business would be on the large business subcontractors. If we were to decide to conduct this procurement as a small business set-aside, the small business prime contractor would be required by regulation to perform 50% or more of the labor dollars and that's one of the reasons why we haven't just relied upon going to GSA and looking at the small business contractors on the appropriate GSA contracts.

So we have looked at the GSA AIMS Federal Supply Schedule and some of the other GSA Federal Supply Schedules and do not yet feel comfortable deciding right now to set-aside this procurement for small businesses.

We’re hoping that we will continue to collect helpful market research results that will either help us confirm that we should set-aside the procurement for small businesses or to conduct the procurement as a full-and-open competition. If we're able to identify two or more viable small business prime contractors, it helps us meet some of the goals that we have for small business contractor participation in our awards which is something that the Department takes very seriously and something that we in the contracts organization take seriously.

But we're always in a position where we have to strike the balance between finding the best contractors to perform the work to help the Department meet its operational capabilities and operational requirements and meeting goals and targets for the type of contracting that we do. So we remain focused on awarding contracts to small businesses on a set-aside basis whenever it makes best sense and whenever the market research indicates that it's a viable approach. We pursue procurements on a full-and-open basis when we don’t have the comfort level that we could conduct an effective small business set-aside.

Albert Palacios:

There is a question on the chat. It says there is a current CTE information dissemination project in the works. Does this solicitation tie to that project in any way?

Steve Scheffer:

No. While they are both focused on CTE, they are separate and distinct procurements.

Albert Palacios:

But all of the work we do in OCTAE and in CTE is inter-related.

Steve Scheffer:

Right.

Albert Palacios:

While this procurement is for the same program office, they are independent projects.

Steve Scheffer:

Exactly.

Albert Palacios:

How many participants will be at the conferences? At this point, we're interested in your capabilities as it relates to organizing and conducting conferences and also your experience facilitating events and providing technical assistance. These events could range from a small training session with 10 or 20 people up to thousands of people at a large public event.

So, at this point, we're interested in your capabilities to plan and conduct those events. At this point, we don’t have any specific plan for - or any specific events of specific sizes with audience sizes so that will come as we get closer to issuing the solicitation. The specific requirements will be provided in the solicitation.

You will notice that some of those tasks are actually optional tasks because we have not finalized our requirements. Some of these tasks, especially for some larger events, may either be issued as optional tasks or as new tasks under the awarded contract once we have greater insight into our ongoing requirements. The contract will include sufficient flexibility so that we are able to pursue larger events and conferences within the contract.

Next question . . . Does the Department expect to use challenge.gov to support the IDIQ given that the contractors are expected to organize the competition as opposed to develop a platform for the competition? We are interested in hearing about your innovative and creative strategies in using both existing resources such as challenge.gov and any other options and innovative solutions that you propose so that such options are available for use by government agencies and we are open to using it but we're also open to any other innovative solutions that you can provide.

The page limit for responding to the FBO Notice is ten pages and responses are due by June 17th at 12:00 PM Eastern Time. Will the contractor be responsible for coordinating travel for the Department for conferences?

The answer is no. Travel costs for Department personnel will be covered by the Department.

Albert Palacios:

There may be travel requirements for the contractor to be at different sites but that will be determined based on specific tasks and events.

Next question: “At what point should a budget be proposed?” Do you want to take that?

Steve Scheffer:

No budget information should be provided with the capabilities statements or in a response to the FBO Notice. Interested parties will be required to include travel costs in their formal proposals that will be submitted in response to a formal solicitation or Request for Proposals.

The FBO Notice will be modified to include a copy of the transcript, a copy of the list of participants and the PowerPoint slide deck. If we modify the performance work statement(s) as a result of the feedback we get from this webinar, we will also provide updates to those performance work statements. We're going to continue to try to provide information to a broad audience to help you all better understand our requirements so interested parties are better able to respond to the solicitation when it's issued.

Albert Palacios:

So just to clarify the prior question . . . will the contractor be responsible for paying the travel cost for attendees, conference attendees or event attendees? For the most part, the answer is no. However, there may be some subject matter experts that we may need to fly in for a specific event so perhaps it's a specialized programmer or some other platform specialist. They may need to be brought in and perhaps their travel or an honorarium might need to be paid by the contractor.

The contractor will not be responsible for organizing travel for a wide range of conference attendees.

Steve Scheffer:

And that would be specifically required in an individual task order. The primary travel for which the contractor will be responsible is for the travel of contractor personnel working on the contract and associated task orders.

Albert Palacios:

But as Steve said, that would be identified in the task orders and then you would be able to include that in the budget for that task order. And are there any other questions on the phone? We're through the chat questions right now. So are there any other questions on the telephone?

Albert Palacios:

Okay. Hearing no other questions, I want to thank all of you for your interest and look forward to reading your capability statements. Thank you for participating.

END