18F preps agile contract for FedRAMP dashboard
The General Services Administration’s 18F team is gearing up to launch the first task order on its agile development contract — a Web dashboard for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.
18F published a draft request for quotations for the FedRAMP dashboard on its GitHub page this week, along with an ordering guide and transparency policy for its agile BPA, on which the project will be awarded.
The digital team launched the agile BPA last June to more than 200 vendors vying for spots on the contract to perform work with 18F for its agency partners, and, in a sense, help it meet the overwhelming demand for digital services work around government. In December, 18F officially awarded 17 spots to vendors on one of its three pools for the BPA after receiving eight protests.
The vendor eventually awarded this task order will build “a publicly available, web-based dashboard that provides greater visibility and up to date status for vendors going through the FedRAMP certification process,” meant to “yield a variety of positive outcomes, including increased transparency and monitoring, improved decision-making and prioritization abilities, reduced effort in compliance activities, among others,” the project’s statement of work says.
The biggest complaints with the FedRAMP process recently have been the time it takes to authorize cloud service providers and the lack of transparency into that certification for outside parties, like the providers and federal agencies. The FedRAMP team recently said it’s working to fix both those issues.
With all of the projects on the agile BPA, awardees will be required to work in two-week delivery sprints, a typical workflow for agile development. Likewise, they must comply with the U.S. Web Design Standards, and 18F’s open source policy and accessibility guidelines. Under the transparency policy, vendors will host their source code on a publicly displayed GitHub page along with other open data and documents, all of which can be pulled by third parties for reuse or repurposing.
Bidding vendors will need to provide two examples or working prototypes of past dashboards they’ve built similar to what FedRAMP is hoping for with this project.
18F plans to release the official RFQ for the dashboard during the week of March 28 and says it would award the contract within four to eight weeks. The team is open to comments on the draft, which can be submitted as issues on the GitHub page.
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