18F Blog

As part of our work building login.gov, a single sign on service for government, we’ve been looking at ways to effectively verify people’s identity online. Not only did we need to find a technology solution to meet this need, we need to find a solution in a stack of brand new possibilities.

Ask 18F is an advice column that answers questions sent in by federal employees. In this edition, we’ll talk about how to recruit tech talent in government

In 2015, 18F had an idea for a better way for federal agencies to hire private vendors to build products and services using agile development techniques. We wanted to see what would happen if we used an existing government process (called a blanket purchase agreement) and tailored it to the needs of agencies looking to update their digital services.

Security compliance is a major factor in launching a software system in the federal government. The Authority To Operate compliance process for systems within our division of GSA was taking more than six months for every system. With the new process, we have cleared the backlog and reduced the turnaround time to under a month.

Here are five procurement hacks — both in the context of our Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) and in general — that we’ve made in the past few years to make the procurement process a bit more joyful and effective.