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The Administration for Children & Families’ Office of Family Assistance, TTS, and the vendor community worked together to improve the TANF Data Reporting System (TDRS) to make it easier and faster for States, Tribes, and Territories to support low income families

As agencies try to adopt agile development practices and modular contracting methods, there are several anti-patterns that we have noticed through the course of our work. We address how these can hinder success and alternatives to consider.

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.

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.

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.

The process of developing and issuing RFPs is often viewed as a one off - a special activity that occurs infrequently and in isolation. What if we applied the principles of iteration and continuous improvement to the way that RFPs are developed?

The way government is writing contracts is wasting time, handcuffing industry, and preventing programs from meeting mission mandates. There’s a better way through an Agile Contract Format.

Monolithic procurement — large, complex, multi-year contracts, which are common in government IT procurement — can appear compelling to agencies that use them. The Technology Transformation Services (TTS) is a strong advocate for an alternative approach known as modular contracting (aka modular procurement).

The Technology Transformation Services (TTS) has been working with the Forest Service in an effort to move their permitting process online. We’ve previously written about how doing this work in the open can benefit other agencies with permit systems. In this post, we’ll focus on why it’s important to have a product owner, what that looks like from the Forest Service’s perspective, and why a product owner is critical to successful projects.

The Technology Transformation Services has been working with the Forest Service in an effort to move their permitting process online. In this post, we’ll focus on how taking a step back to check your assumptions can reduce the risk that your project will go off course.

From our experience with the Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA), we’ve found that in order to build effective cross-functional teams and successful IT projects, we need alignment on several principles

The Technology Transformation Service (TTS) has been working with the Forest Service since August 2016 on what will eventually be an agency-wide system to process permit applications. TTS is primarily helping the Forest Service hire private vendors for this work, rather than building it ourselves, and one way we’re improving that process is through “discovery research.”

We’re writing this to remember and pay tribute to Larry Mathias, who passed away unexpectedly this month. Larry was a senior contracting officer at the General Services Administration. He managed technology systems for the OASIS program and was instrumental in helping GSA launch this new contract vehicle. Larry was also an early believer in 18F.

Our recent work with state government agencies in California and Mississippi provides some powerful examples of how 18F’s commitment to working and learning in the open can provide enormous benefits — even to states that are not yet working directly with 18F.

The Technology Transformation Service recently held an industry day to talk to the private sector community about our vision, our projects, and how GSA and vendors can work together to bring modern digital services to the federal government. For that event, California’s Stuart Drown recorded a short video talking about 18F’s work with California on their Child Welfare System.

Built on the lessons learned during the pilot phase of the Digital Acquisitions Accelerator, the accompanying playbook examines the current acquisition landscape and provides an approach to procuring custom software solutions. Our goal is to make the government a smarter and more informed buyer of digital products and services.

This is the second in a series of three blog posts that provide a step-by-step guide to how we led the inception workshop.

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.

In August, we announced the Full-stack Development Pool vendors for the Agile Delivery Services Marketplace. As we continue to work on the alpha version of this marketplace, we're beginning to plan out additional micro-markets as well.

As the first Agile BPA awards are now being issued, we asked three members of the team about the process and the lessons they’ve learned so far.

Clients of 18F Consulting frequently ask for help defining labor categories for agile contracts. We’ve published these definitions in a public GitHub repo so other acquisition professionals can benefit from them, too. Read on for more details.

The federal government and industry community have been talking about the need for software acquisitions to keep pace with technology cycles — typically 1-3 years. In today’s dynamic environment, however, not even that is fast enough.

Today we're announcing our first product launch: FBOpen, a set of open-source tools to help small businesses search for opportunities to work with the U.S. government.