Request for Information (RFI) - Final.docx

UNCLASSIFIED

MCC Software Development Services Request for Information (RFI) Package

RFI Questions

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) seeks responses to the questions below. While desired, respondents are not required to provide answers to all questions. If you choose not to answer a question, please respond with “N/A” to the corresponding question number.

Responses to this RFI should not exceed twenty (20) pages in total, excluding the cover page and table of contents. Respondents may allocate the available pages among the RFI questions as they deem appropriate and are encouraged to provide sufficient detail to fully address the questions and provide information that will assist the Government in conducting meaningful market research and refining the requirement and acquisition strategy.

Responses should be clear, concise, and directly relevant to the information requested. Respondents are discouraged from including generic corporate marketing materials, promotional literature, or other information that does not directly address the Government's requirements or RFI questions. Respondents may also provide relevant recommendations, alternative approaches, lessons learned, or other information not specifically requested in this RFI if they believe such information would assist the Government in defining the requirement or acquisition strategy.

1. Please provide your company name, address, telephone number, point of contact name (including contact information), and company size. What NAICS code do you recommend for this procurement and what is your company size standard under this NAICS code?

2. Please share any questions or feedback on the draft performance work statement or MCC’s IT Environment. This feedback will be utilized to refine and enhance the final Request for Proposal (RFP). Is there any additional information that your company would require in order to submit a competitive proposal in response to the eventual solicitation?

3. Please provide a list of the government-wide acquisition contract vehicles that your company holds, and/or contracting vehicles that you would recommend for an IT acquisition of this scope.

4. Please provide a brief (not to exceed 1 page) capabilities statement detailing your company’s expertise and prior experience in providing IT support services similar in scope to MCC’s requirements to other Federal and/or multilateral clients.

5. Contract Management

a. MCC is evaluating opportunities to increase the use of firm-fixed-price (FFP) contracting for software development in alignment with recent Administration policy emphasizing greater use of fixed-price contracting where appropriate. Describe how your organization would recommend structuring a software development effort to maximize the appropriate use of FFP while maintaining the flexibility necessary to accommodate evolving requirements, technical uncertainty, and changing priorities. This can include hybrid FFP/T&M approaches.

b. Do you have any experience working with SLAs for contracts similar in scope? Please provide examples.

c. The current deliverables are listed in the PWS (Section 5.0). What additional deliverables or changes to the current deliverables would you recommend, particularly in the context of FFP components of the contract?”

d. Can you list the key personnel labor categories you would recommend for a contract of this size and scope?

6. MCC is interested in understanding industry capabilities and proven approaches for developing and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to support Federal agency missions. Respondents shall describe their experience successfully delivering and implementing AI capabilities. Experience with any organization is relevant, but we are especially interested in any experience with Federal agencies with similar size and scope. Do not include proposed solutions, pilots, or proofs of concept that have not been deployed in an operational environment.

a. Do you have any formal or dedicated AI organization or program within your own corporate structure? If so, is it focused on internal use, customer use, both, or another purpose?

b. What approach do you propose to leverage AI to responsibly and securely accelerate and improve application development? Accountability for the results and code must remain with people and not delegated to AI.

7. Staffing

a. Please provide an overview of your capability and methodology for staffing projects to provide for evolving requirements and technologies, including right-sizing staffing levels to fluctuating workloads to support software engineering projects or other initiatives over the life of the contract.

b. Describe the strategies, practices, and management approaches your organization uses to attract and retain highly skilled personnel supporting Federal contracts and to minimize the loss of institutional knowledge, productivity, and mission continuity resulting from employee turnover.

c. MCC may periodically need to rapidly increase capacity or obtain specialized expertise in response to emerging mission requirements, new technology priorities, cybersecurity needs, or other areas of strategic interest. These needs may be temporary and may not justify maintaining a full-time dedicated team for the duration of the contract. Describe your organization's approach to providing rapid, temporary surge capacity to support emerging or unanticipated MCC requirements. If possible, include anticipated timelines for surge staff – in other words, if a new requirement emerged, how long do you anticipate it would take to identify, onboard, and deploy personnel with the relevant expertise?

8. MCC seeks to obtain high-quality software development services while ensuring that contractor resources are used efficiently and that costs remain commensurate with the value and complexity of the work. MCC is interested in industry approaches that avoid unnecessary staffing, excessive management overhead, duplicative effort, or other resource-intensive practices that may increase the cost of software development without a corresponding improvement in outcomes. Describe the cost control measures and delivery practices your organization would employ to provide efficient and cost-effective software development services.

9. Cybersecurity

a. How is cybersecurity integrated into requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance?

b. How are third-party libraries, open-source components, and packages identified and managed?

c. How do you continuously monitor 3rd party and open-source components for newly discovered vulnerabilities?

d. How do you incorporate Zero Trust principles into software development efforts?

10. DevSecOps

a. Describe any experience that your company has had with hosting and maintaining an entire DevSecOps pipeline for a client. Please specify if the work was done for a Federal client. Does this include hosting the production environment? If not, describe your approach for interacting with the infrastructure provider/team.

11. Application Operations and Maintenance

a. Please review MCC’s list of applications and outline your company’s proposed Operations and Maintenance (O&M) approach. What do you recommend in size and structure of an O&M team to ensure coverage without overstaffing or understaffing? Include how the requirements will be adjusted over time to address evolving needs as applications move out of the development phase into O&M and eventually retire.

12. MCC Environment

a. Please outline your company’s experience and approach to developing and maintaining solutions on established platforms such as .NET, PowerApps, SharePoint Online, Box.com and ServiceNow.

13. Software Development Practices

a. Describe the software development methodology your organization would recommend for MCC's software development environment. Explain how your approach would support the delivery of high-quality software while maintaining flexibility to respond to changing mission priorities, requirements, technology, and user needs. Include -

i. How you translate Government priorities and user needs into requirements, a prioritized backlog, development increments, and measurable outcomes;

ii. How you estimate and plan development work, including your approach to managing uncertainty in requirements and estimates;

iii. How you manage changing priorities and requirements without creating unnecessary rework, cost, or schedule impacts;

iv. How you balance development velocity with software quality, cybersecurity, testing, documentation, and maintainability;

v. How you measure team performance and software delivery, including metrics you recommend using to assess progress, quality, productivity, and value delivered;

vi. Examples of comparable Federal software development efforts where your methodology resulted in successful delivery of mission capabilities; and

vii. Describe any aspects of the MCC’s organizational structure, decision-making processes, staffing model, or contract structure that you believe are particularly important to successfully implementing your proposed development methodology.

b. Please describe your experience creating and executing automated test scripts.

c. Please describe your approach to, and experience in, developing applications to reside in a cloud hosted environment.

14. Our current custom-developed applications are hosted primarily using traditional server and database architectures within cloud IaaS environments. We are interested in evolving toward a more modern, cloud-native application development and hosting model that reduces reliance on individually managed servers and makes greater use of managed platform services, serverless technologies, automated CI/CD pipelines, and repeatable deployment practices.

a. What approach would you recommend for transitioning our application portfolio to this model? Please describe the proposed target architecture and application delivery approach, including how applications would be developed, tested, deployed, operated, and maintained. Please also identify the expected benefits, key implementation considerations and tradeoffs, and the primary cost drivers and opportunities for cost optimization.

15. MCC is considering establishing a single-award Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA), with individual orders issued by service area. Please provide feedback on this contemplated structure, including any advantages, disadvantages, pricing considerations, performance risks, or alternative approaches that MCC should consider.

Appendix A –Performance Work Statement (PWS) Requirements (provided under separate cover)

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