12-7-2016_Telephone_Conference_and_Q&As.pdf

RFP-SGE50017R0010 – Numbering is continued from the Question & Answers document.

A telephone conference was held on December 7, 2016. Three companies, Mr. Tim Farrell and Mr. John Dawson from INL Jerusalem and Ms Chris Heck from RPSO Frankfurt participated. The purpose of this conference call was to allow potential offerors to place additional questions.

12. The due date has been revised to December 20, 2016 at 11.00 a.m. CET. This is for the receipt of the electronic / e-mail version. Receipt of the hard copies shall be within 24 hours after that time. Hard copies may be sent by courier to the Regional Procurement Support Office Frankfurt.

13. Questions and Answers will be posted on FedBizOpps.

14. Vetting – Local and / or third country nationals require FTO vetting and may take between 30 and 40 days. There will be time allowed at the beginning of the contract period to submit personnel lists and information required to the Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR).

15. There are 8 CLINS (contract line items) in the RFP (Request for Proposals). INL’s understanding is that the work will take place on site (West Bank) and that each CLIN requires one full-time employee position.

16. Question – Will the contractor be allowed flexibility regarding the staffing, i.e. we expect that some CLINs may require more than one full-time employee and some employees may, at least for limited periods, cover more than one CLIN. This doesn’t mean we intend to allocate less than 8 full time employees, they just may not be allocated to one specific CLIN only, e.g. the training or IT staff may work on more than one CLIN. Will this be acceptable to INL or would it make our proposal non-compliant?

Answer – INL has no objection to flexibility. The above was the assumption we took for creating the SOW (statement of work). If your company determines that one employee may cover more than one CLIN, that is acceptable. Staff can work on more than one CLIN. If your technical and cost proposal is based on 8 staffers, then we expect to see 8 people staffing the contract. The USG (US Government) is only charged for the number of employees actually working on the project. John Dawson will be the Project Manager and he will work directly with the contractor.

17. Attachment 2 is the pricing format, 8 people with loaded rates including overhead and profit.

It’s pretty straight forward.

18. Section L of the RFP provides the instructions on what to include and how to provide the proposal package. It includes a statement not to exceed 20 pages, this applies to the technical proposal. You can add annexes for past performance, institutional capacity and the resumes.

The latter should be no more than two pages each.

19. Question – With regards to legislative drafting, there’s a lot of legal research will require highly trained specialists, so are we correct in the assumption that you will require a mixture of various levels and fields?

Answer – For the legislative drafting we require some legal background which should reflect in the resume but there’s also a fair amount of administrative or graduate level work. So yes, we will expect a mix of various levels of qualifications and backgrounds. Match the resumes to the CLINs.

20. INL provided a plug figure of $50,000 for CLINS 008, 1008, and 2008. That’s for planning and developing the requirement to fit out the lab.

21. Question – The RFP refers to the contractor having access to a pool of subject-matter experts.

In view of the CLIN and pricing structure, how do you intend to utilize those?

Answer – The employees identified on the CLINs are what INL considers to be the pool of experts.

22. Question – Can you give us a breakdown of how many of the Palestinian project staff are actually working in legal research and how many in the training program or admin staff?

Answer – This is a brand new program and there are roughly forty people working at the DIWAN right now. We will provide exact information via FedBizOpps later this week.

23. Question – Since there may be other ministries involved in the legislative drafting do you expect the work will include cooperation with other ministries?

Answer – That is absolutely possible. Cooperation with other ministries is all very much in a flow of this project. There have been changes in which ministry or official who reports to whom. They are working on clarifying the process. There could be input from the Ministry of Energy or the Attorney General’s office which may lead to the contractor suggesting joint training sessions. It could also include the above or the Ministry of Housing or others. The legislative requirements of the ministries will be reviewed to see if they fit into the contract structure. The Program Manager will provide guidance on work with the ministries.

24. Tim Farrell will be in Frankfurt to jointly evaluate the proposals received. Taking into account the holiday absences in various offices, the best-case scenario is to award a contract in late January 2017.