JA BTSSS For Award Synopsis.pdf

FORCE ENTRY VA-21-00004037

JUSTIFICATION

FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, NJ 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a modification to Firm-Fixed-Price (FFP) Task Order (TO) VA11816F10150011 under Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Next Generation (T4NG) Contract VA118-16-D-1015 with Liberty IT Solutions, LLC (Liberty) which was awarded on September 28, 2016 for Beneficiary Travel Self-Service System (BTSSS) Software Development. Due to a VA mandated decommissioning of the IBM Rational Tool suite a modification to this TO is required in order for Liberty to reproduce project artifacts and reconfigure the VA approved toolset with all management selective data items created during the life cycle of BTSSS.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: Department of VA, Office of Information and Technology (OIT) has an immediate requirement to migrate to a new collaboration platform tool due to the decommissioning efforts of the IBM Rational Tool suite, effective September 30, 2020. The new collaboration platform tool supports Agile Center of Excellence guidelines governing a Product Line Management (PLM) framework that focuses on delivering functional products that provide the highest priority work to customers while delivering simplified, reliable and practical solutions to the business, medical staff, and our Veterans. BTSSS provides ancillary services related to the collection/analysis of historical claims data, management of, and visibility into, prospective travel claim submissions and development of claims submission and processing that maximizes the ease, efficiency and accuracy of the travel claims. In addition, it provides meaningful data/feedback for ongoing optimization of the travel claims process.

This modification will complete a tool migration and toolset configuration build of Operations and Maintenance Services to include the following toolsets: GitHub for Source Code repository; a configured Defect management repository from Rational QM to Jira/Xray; a configured Requirement Management repository from Rational RM to Jira/Confluence and Dashboard; and a configured Sprint Plans and Issue Management repository from Rational RTC to Jira. This modification will create an opportunity and adoption of more contemporary toolsets with features capable of improving operational support and faster turnaround for fixes, increase confidence in quality and reliability of new and modified features and gain efficiency which will allow more resources to nurture innovation of use of resources to address other improvements to customer experience.

The period of performance will be October 20, 2020 through January 29, 2021. The total estimated value of the proposed action is $294,136.20.

4. Statutory Authority: The statutory authority permitting an exception to fair opportunity is Section 41 U.S.C. 4106(c)(2) as implemented by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B) entitled, "Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized.”

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: VA requires a migration from IBM Rational Suite to another collaboration platform tool. The new toolset will include all the selective data items created during the life cycle of BTSSS, along with the evaluation of new techniques and capabilities of maturing historical life cycle management data items. The migration is necessary to provide any future project management activity opportunities such as sprint planning, requirement elaboration, prioritization, development, testing and implementation/release.

In order to meet the BTSSS management requirement of an optimum toolset configuration, the technical expertise on the current TO is required. For the configuration to be successful, it requires inherent knowledge of the historical data item relationships and logical intent in the new repositories without effecting any current development efforts on-going under the TO. Liberty is the only contractor that has the inherent knowledge of the nuances of BTSSS, the use and purpose of each data item and the areas for optimization that are necessary or available for each data item within the former IBM Rational Tool suite. It would take a new contractor approximately 60 days to understand the current standard operating procedures and gain the required technical expertise specific to BTSSS in order to even begin the process of optimizing the data items currently in the respository.

In addition to the above, BTSSS’ is currently in the product development stage where new data items are being created or updated for ongoing contract activities. During this development stage if a new contractor was hired to configure the BTSSS Data Items the current contractor would have to pause development until the data items were optimized in order to ensure that any builds would be successful and compliant with the optimized data items. If development continued and a new Contractor was introduced it could result in numerous failed tests and unacceptable delays to key enhancements of the BTSSS system. Liberty is the only contractor that would be able to ensure that development could continue in conjunction with the required data item optimization.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in the market research section of this document. This effort did not yield any additional sources that can meet the Government’s requirements. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D), the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Contract Opportunities/beta.SAM.gov site and the justification will be made publicly available within 14 days of award.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: The Government is scoping additional efforts for a new Task Order to follow after the current Task Order expires, with an award forecasted for fiscal year 2021. Based on market research, as detailed in the market research section of this document, the Government expects the future effort to be issued on T4NG on a competitive basis.

8. Market Research: The Government's technical experts conducted market research in October 2020 to ascertain the ability of other sources meeting VA's needs.

Specifically, other sources on T4NG were reviewed (VetsEZ, FTC, GovernmentCIO and ProSphere.) to ascertain their ability to meet VA's needs. While other sources were found to have similar general capabilities, no other source was found with the technical expertise and experience. Specifically, no other source was found that can meet VA's needs in the required timeframe to successfully provide configuration of the data repositiory without an interruption to current development in BTSSS.

9. Other Facts: N/A