18F Blog

As we work through this pilot phase of the Digital Acquisition Accelerator, we’ll be sharing our work and the lessons we learn. We hope this will help other interested teams follow along and also give the public on opportunity to give us feedback on our pilot. Here are three techniques that our team practiced with the FBI and Treasury teams during the recent kickoff of the pilot.

Two months ago, the 18F acquisitions team ran a public micro-purchase auction to find a vendor to develop a small new feature for 18F's cloud.gov, and for the first time after several successful micro-purchases for other products, the contracted vendor didn’t deliver the code on time. This was very interesting to us we’re early in the life of the micro-purchase platform, and we believe that failure is a great way to learn. In the spirit of experimentation and sharing our lessons, here’s how we went about analyzing this, and here’s what we learned.