360-Degree Multi-Rater Survey Administration and Reporting Platform_SSN Final.pdf

U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Human Resources Solutions (HRS)

360-Degree/Multi-Rater Survey Administration and Reporting Platform

Sources Sought Notice

Purpose and Objective:

This is a Sources Sought Notice to identify small businesses that are capable of providing a 360- Degree/Multi-Rater Survey Administration and Reporting Platform. This purpose is to establish a one (1) year base contract plus four (4) one-year option periods for provision of a 360- Degree/Multi-Rater Survey Administration and Reporting Platform for Human Resources Solutions (HRS) within the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

HRS seeks to acquire the self-service use of a 508-compliant survey platform to create, administer, produce reports, and download data for a variety of 360-degree/multi-rater online surveys. Through this action, HRS is not seeking assistance with project management, survey development, survey building, survey administration, statistical analyses, or interpretation. HRS staff will serve as the survey creators and administrators. The Contractor will work directly with HRS and will have no interaction with HRS’s customer agencies. HRS will assign a small number of staff to serve as points of contact with the Contractor.

The self-service ability to create, administer, produce reports, and download data for a variety of 360-degree/multi-rater online surveys is critical in order for HRS to provide reimbursable services that help government agencies meet their missions. Examples of the types of surveys HRS administers include, but are not limited to, the OPM Leadership 360™ assessment and the OPM Leadership Potential Assessment (LPA).

This notice is issued solely for informational and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids, Request for Proposal, or Request for Quotations. In accordance with FAR 15.201(e), responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract, nor do they affect a potential offeror's ability to respond to any future solicitation, which may or may not follow or restrict the U.S. Government's eventual acquisition approach.

Additionally, the U.S. Government will not provide reimbursement for any information that may be submitted in response to this notice. Respondents are solely responsible for all expenses associated with responding.

Background:

HRS has experience providing assessment-related reimbursable products and services to agencies and their sub-components across the U.S. Government, U.S. Military, and state and local governments. Each year, HRS may administer multi-rater assessments for five thousand or more participants, each with up to twenty (and in some cases, more) raters.

Typical 360-Degree/Multi-Rater Survey Process:

1) A customer agency sends HRS a list of between 10 and 150 survey participants. Each group of participants is considered a survey session.

2) HRS uploads participant information (names, email addresses, etc.) for a survey session into the survey platform.

3) Participants receive a system-generated invitation email with instructions to select raters, including their supervisor, peers, direct reports, and other relevant coworkers, to assess their leadership skills.

4) Participants access a personalized survey or webpage where they enter each rater’s name, email address, and rater type (supervisor, peer, direct report, or other).

5) Participants submit their rater list, then the survey platform automatically sends survey invitation emails to raters and self-assessment invitation emails to participants.

6) The participant completes their self-assessment.

7) Raters complete their ratings of the associated participant.

8) Throughout the survey administration, participants can monitor survey completion, add new raters, and edit rater information.

9) At periodic points throughout the session, progress reports are sent to participants, and system-generated reminder emails are sent to participants and raters who have not yet completed the survey.

10) Throughout the survey administration, the HRS survey administrator can monitor participant progress and the customer agency POC can also receive progress reports for the participants in their session.

11) At the end of the administration period, HRS produces (a) an individual feedback report for each participant and (b) one or more aggregate reports for all participants combined (or subsets of participants). The individual feedback report compiles the participant’s self-assessment and the associated raters’ assessments.

Capability Statement / Information Sought:

Interested businesses are encouraged to respond to this notice. However, be advised that generic capability statements are not sufficient for effective review of respondents’ capacity and capability to perform the specific work as required. Responses must directly demonstrate the company’s capability, experience and/or ability to satisfy the services requirements detailed below.

Services Requirements:

1.0 Scope

The 360-Degree/Multi-rater Survey Administration and Reporting Platform and all measurement tools will be provided either as software we may install in our data center or as cloud-hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) and priced on an annual basis (firm fixed pricing).

HRS requires unlimited access for approximately 25 government personnel who will serve as survey administrators. Survey administration capabilities must include (1) creating and storing hundreds of survey items/questions and dozens of response scales and (2) the capacity to run several dozen concurrent survey sessions and hundreds of survey sessions during the subscription period. Access is also required for thousands of survey participants and hundreds of thousands of raters for the purpose of completing surveys as assigned.

2.0 Performance Objectives (Required Results)

The 360-Degree/Multi-Rater Survey Administration and Reporting Platform will be 508-compliant and provided either as software we may install in our data center or as cloud-hosted SaaS. For a cloud-hosted SaaS platform, the Contractor must currently hold FedRAMP-Moderate authorization.

In addition, the 360-Degree/Multi-rater Survey Administration and Reporting Platform must also be capable of, but not limited to, the functional, operational, and technical objectives listed below.

2.1 Pre-Existing 360-Degree/Multi-rater Infrastructure

1) The Contractor’s platform must have an established, tested, production-ready 360-degree/multi-rater survey infrastructure already in use by customers to:

a. Build 508-compliant 360-degree/multi-rater surveys.

b. Administer 360-degree/multi-rater surveys.

c. Monitor completion status of participants and raters in 360-degree/multi-rater surveys.

d. Export data from 360-degree/multi-rater surveys.

2) The system will have the capability to produce results reports for 360-degree/multi-rater surveys.

3) HRS will not be required to create or configure the processes or mechanisms for importing a participant roster, sending rater invitations, viewing completion status for survey takers, exporting data, and producing reports.

2.2 Administrative Access

1) The platform must accommodate Microsoft AzureAD Single-Sign On (SSO) using a Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card.

2) The platform must permit, at a minimum, a superuser admin role that allows the user to create/administer surveys as well as view, edit, and download data from all survey sessions in the platform. This role would receive the highest permission levels allowed instance wide.

3) The platform will also permit a lower-level admin role that allows the user to administer, create, view, download data from, and edit only their own survey sessions or survey sessions they have been given permission to access.

2.3 Survey Building

1) Item Types

a. The platform must support a wide range of standard item types, including

Likert-type, mark-one, mark-all-that-apply, drop-down, ranking, choose a specific number of responses, and text.

b. HRS must be able to set character limits for text items (a maximum of up to at least 4,000 characters). A counter must inform the user of how many characters they have left and/or have used.

c. Mark-one and mark-all-that-apply items must be able to contain an “Other – specify” response option for respondents to type text to explain.

d. Mark-all-that-apply items must have the ability to set a response option as exclusive.

2) Item and Response Validation

a. Administrators must be able to set certain items as required; users must be prompted if they do not provide an answer to a required item.

b. The platform must support response validation for the following:

i. The correct number of “choose a specific number of responses” responses are selected.

ii. Text comments are within the allowable range.

iii. Dates are in the proper format.

iv. Numbers are within the allowable range.

3) Conditioning

a. The platform must allow items to be shown or hidden based on responses to a single item and a combination of items.

b. The platform must allow items to be shown or hidden based on uploaded information about respondents.

c. The platform must allow conditional logic to be applied to entire items (i.e., show/hide an entire item, including associated response options).

d. The platform must allow conditional logic to be applied to specific response options for an item (i.e., show/hide only certain response options within an item).

e. The platform must allow conditional logic to be applied to entire survey pages (i.e., show/hide an entire page).

4) Piping

a. The platform must have question piping capability, which allows one to insert, or "pipe," answer text from a previous question or information in the roster into instructions or a question on a later page in the survey. For example, if the participant identifies a rater as the supervisor, the survey pipes “supervisor” in the rater survey instructions, or the survey pipes in the name of the participant the rater is assessing.

5) Survey customization

a. HRS must be able to create new/custom items.

b. HRS must be able to create new/custom response scales.

c. HRS must be able to be create a new survey by “cloning” or duplicating an existing survey and modifying as necessary.

d. Survey formatting must be flexible and customizable so that HRS can add branding, images, colors, and more without using coding or programming language.

e. HRS must be able to determine page breaks and spacing.

f. Once a user submits their responses, they must be presented with either a customizable “thank you” message in a dialog box or a customizable “thank you” page.

2.4 Participant and Rater Invitations

1) The platform must have a pre-existing mechanism to upload a roster of survey participants in bulk (not one at a time) that does not require HRS to create or configure the process or mechanism or use coding/programming language.

2) HRS must be able to add new participants during an administration.

3) Participants must be able to submit rater information, including first name, last name, email address, and rater category without HRS involvement.

4) The platform must have a pre-existing mechanism to automatically send personalized rater invitation emails in bulk when participants submit their rater information that ideally does not require HRS to create or configure the process or mechanism.

5) Participants must be able to add/edit raters at any point, ideally without HRS involvement.

6) Email invitation and reminder text must be customizable and must include the option for fillable fields (e.g., participant name) and allow for text-only or HTML format.

7) HRS must have the ability to send email invitations and reminders on a set schedule.

8) HRS must have the ability to send/resend email invitations and send reminders on demand, ideally without interrupting future scheduled reminders.

9) Reminder emails must be “smart reminders” that do not go to participants or raters who have already completed the survey.

10) HRS must be able to send notification and reminder emails individually to a specific person or in bulk to a group of participants and/or raters.

2.5 Email Transmission and Routing

1) The platform must accommodate custom domains to mask the website URL and survey logon links so that they reflect a specified opm.gov website and opm.gov logon links (not dot.com or other commercial domains).

2) The platform must be able to send emails on behalf of an opm.gov subdomain, such as “USASurveyEx.opm.gov” or similar. (It cannot be the top-level domain opm.gov because OPM has an impediment with adding top level SPF records.)

3) HRS must be able to specify the outgoing email address.

4) The platform must be able to route outgoing emails (e.g., survey invitations/reminders) through OPM mail servers for processing and delivery.

2.6 Data Collection

1) Survey takers must be able to access the survey using a unique/individual URL.

2) The platform must save responses automatically, either as the survey taker pages forward or with each selection, and survey takers must be able to return to a saved survey.

3) A direct link into a survey must be possible by embedding the passcode into the survey URL so that survey takers do not need to type or copy-and-paste the passcode.

4) Once a survey has been submitted, the associated unique passcode must become disabled.

5) HRS must be able to “unlock” a completed survey to make the survey active for the respondent.

6) The platform must have a pre-existing mechanism for HRS to monitor participant and rater survey completion status (i.e., the list of participants in a particular survey session with their self-assessment completion status, number of raters in each rater group invited by each participant, number of completed ratings in each rater group for each participant, etc.) that does not require HRS to create or configure the process, mechanism, or relevant variables.

7) The platform must have a pre-existing mechanism for participants to monitor their own assessment completion status (i.e., the individual participant’s self-assessment completion status, number of raters they invited, and number of completed ratings they’ve received in each rater group) that does not require HRS to create or configure the process, mechanism, or relevant variables.

8) The platform must have a pre-existing mechanism for HRS to monitor assessment completion status (i.e., participants’ self-assessment completion status, number of raters invited in each rater group, and number of completed ratings received in each rater group) that does not require HRS to create or configure the process, mechanism, or relevant variables.

9) There must be a search function to locate specific participants and raters in the system by email address that does not require configuration by HRS.

10) The platform must allow HRS to reversibly withdraw and restore survey-taker access to a survey before and after the survey deadline.

11) Surveys must maintain all functionality on phones, tablets, and similar devices.

12) The platform must support dozens of active survey sessions at one time, each of which receives a high volume of responses and requires the sending of a high volume of invitations/reminders.

2.7 Simple and Straightforward Data Export

1) Raw survey data (i.e., response values and coded identifiers) must be available for HRS to access and download at any time during or after a survey administration without contractor assistance and at no additional cost.

2) The platform must have a pre-existing mechanism for HRS to export data in bulk for all items, participants, and raters in a particular survey session that does not require HRS to create or configure the process, mechanism, or relevant survey items.

2.8 Report Production

1) The platform must produce deliverable quality, print-ready color reports.

2) Reports must be producible in batches and for one-off, specific breakouts.

3) The platform must offer a variety of presentations for multiple data types, including:

a. 100% stacked bar charts

b. Line graphs

c. Benchmarks with range indicators

d. Most and least favorable items

e. Change indicators (e.g., up arrow for improvement)

4) HRS must be able to create their own report templates for repeated use or provide the information necessary for the Contractor to create report templates at no additional cost.

5) A mechanism must exist for HRS to select which specific template to use when producing reports (e.g., for different types of 360-degree/multi-rater surveys).

6) HRS must be able to set the required minimum number of respondents for each rater group (e.g., 1 supervisor, 3 peers, etc.). If a rater group does not contain the required minimum number of raters, that group’s scores must not be shown in reports as a breakout, but the scores will be included in the average all rater responses. Each rater group must have a default requirement, which HRS can override for a particular session.

7) Reports must be able to include benchmark comparisons.

8) Administrators must be able to upload benchmark data for items, aggregates/scales, and other quantitative results.

9) A mechanism must exist for HRS to select which specific benchmarks to include in reports.

10) The platform must produce reports that include basic introductory and interpretation textual commentary.

11) Reports must be able to include a section that contains open-ended comments.

2.9 FedRAMP Hosting, if Applicable

1) If the system is offered as a cloud-hosted SaaS, the Contractor must provide FedRAMP-Moderate authorized hosting that is compliant with FedRAMP-Moderate security controls. This includes a yearly audit by a Third-Party Audit Organization (3PA), Authority to Operate (ATO) as approved by the Joint Advisory Board, and technical support services which meet the requirements of FedRAMP-Moderate controls.

2.10 Training and Support

1) The Contractor must provide training to ensure HRS can fully implement survey services.

2) The system’s 360-degree/multi-rater-specific survey processes, features, and instructions will be documented by the Contractor in a user guide available to HRS.

3) The Contractor must provide responsive support to ensure HRS can fully implement and maintain survey services.

4) The Contractor must make available employees that are capable of passing the necessary security clearance to support technical and survey administration needs.

5) HRS must own all data, survey content, survey responses, reports and reporting templates developed as part of this contract. The Contractor must not share HRS’s data, survey content, survey responses, reports, reporting templates, or any other aspect of HRS’s instance with customers or potential customers.

3.0 Type of Contract Contemplated

The contract type will be Firm Fixed Price. The use of a per survey or per respondent pricing strategy will not be acceptable. Interested Parties shall address estimated costs as part of their response. To the degree practicable, please provide a rough order of magnitude cost estimate for software, development, implementation, and operational support for a project of this type. Also, discuss the drivers and components for your estimated cost.

Instructions for Responding to This Sources Sought Notice

Information provided in response to this Sources Sought Notice must be submitted no later than fourteen

(14) calendar days from the date of posting.

Responses to this notice shall include 1) Qualifications/Capability Statements including responses to the questions below and 2) a cover letter, at a minimum, including the following information:

1. Response to Sources Sought Notice

2. Vendor’s Company Name, Address, Contact Person Information;

3. Vendor’s DUNS Number;

4. Business Size and Size Standard / Classification relative to North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code of 721110

5. Proposed GSA Schedule (if applicable).

Please note that the collection of this data does not obligate the U.S. Government to the incorporation of the solicited comments in any future procurement action nor does it obligate the Government to the procurement of any services or products related to this notice. Proprietary information should not be included in the responses, further, responses to this notice will not be returned.

HRS may conduct capabilities meetings with vendors that appear to satisfy the requirements as outlined in this notice to clarify any information in their Statement of Qualifications/Capability Statements.

Submission Instructions:

All Statement of Qualifications/Capability Statements sent in response to this Sources Sought Notice must be submitted electronically (via email) to the following:

*Lichon Ramsey @ lichon.ramsey@opm.gov

The subject line of your electronic submission shall state the following:

*SP-HRS- 727859 Sources Sought Notice

HRS requests that the Statement of Qualifications/Capabilities Statement which is the response to questions below not exceed ten (10) single spaced pages. Each response should use the following Page Setup parameters:

• Margins – Top, Bottom, Left, Right - 1”

• Page Size – 8.5”x11”

The following additional restrictions apply:

• Each paragraph shall be separated by at least one blank line.

• A standard, 10-point minimum font size applies.

*All questions shall be submitted to Lichon Ramsey (lichon.ramsey@opm.gov) via email no later than 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 7, 2023.

*All responses shall be in MS Word or Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and submitted to Lichon Ramsey (lichon.ramsey@opm.gov) via email by 3:00 PM EST on December 7, 2023.

*All responses must be received by the specified due date and time to be considered responsive.

Additional Information:

There is no commitment by the U.S. Government to issue a solicitation, to make an award(s), or to be responsible for any monies expended by any interested parties in support of any effort in response to this Sources Sought Notice. Any information submitted in response to these sources sought notice is strictly voluntary. This Sources Sought Notice is for information/planning purposes and the U.S. Government will not pay or otherwise reimburse respondents for information submitted. It is the responsibility of potential offerors to monitor this site for the release of any follow-on information. All documentation shall become the property of the U.S. Government. Unless otherwise stated herein, no additional information is available and any request for additional information will be disregarded.

mailto:lichon.ramsey@opm.gov mailto:lichon.ramsey@opm.gov