Prior delivery is not generally a major consideration in a govt RFP award.
This is in part because no score is ever released related to prior delivery (ie, no central assessment record), and attempts to include it get tied up in process issues (ie, rights to respond, litigation) or claims it is subjective. It also overlaps with govt agency disfunction around scope and requirements and no govt manager wants a failed project, so everyone just sweeps them under the rug and keeps moving. It is crazy though, you are literally hiring the same HORRIBLE firms over and over.
What is PARAMOUNT is that you be willing spend absolute metric tons of UNPAID time responding to RFP's, have enough money in bank to lose 4 out of 5, be willing to go through 2 year RFP processes, be willing to agree to every item on the requirements lists filled with further buzzwords and "standards". This does NOT attract high performing companies, no competent engineer would even put up with this / sit through this. So you get body shop type consulting firms, using giant java framework and other solutions, and everything is insanely siloed.
The crazy pricing is often justified because the hassle in dealing with these contracts from a contract admin overhead can absolutely DWARF actual deliverables, and nothing has to be logical (and sometimes is not).
My recommendations here would be either:
a) just pay to bring stuff in house so you get cooperation, develop open source apps and prohibit any scope creep outside of absolute minimum needed until project is in operation. EVERY freaking agency hangs 100's of new requirements they never even used before onto these projects - solutions can be undeliverable and unusable as a result, for example 40 questions PER VACINNE SHOT here in California is the height of stupidity to make these idiots feel important.
b) pay for actual use / adoption, and let there be a somewhat free market. A lot of time the users of any govt system have ZERO input. Oddly, if they let agencies find their own solutions on a smaller scale, whatever you lose in "efficiency" by not having the megaproject (hint nothing - mega projects = disaster in govt land) you would see some natural winning solutions start to bubble up. I worked with an agency with a totally fantastic contract management / invoicing system, and I kept on wondering, holy hell, they actually got it right. I started to see other agencies use it in neighboring govts - it was great - people really liked it (super easy use, allowed users to do the google, Microsoft etc login even which is unheard of) and it was fast which is also rare.
But then someone convinced the head tech folks they should stomp on everything with the new and improved people. They actually had to roll back the mega project for another year (after years of dev) because it didn't even cover a fraction of what old systems easily did.
RFPs frequently reference past activity. That’s just not accurate.
The reality is that you only hear about failed projects. When was the last time that you heard about taxes not being collected or welfare payments not being paid or SNAP cards not being refilled?
It’s all background activity, and those awful contractor companies are often responsible for material aspects of delivery.
But there is rarely a determination that past activity resulted in a failure or success. You usually just have to show that you have had contracts for past activity (and yes, have not been disbarred etc- which happens very very rarely). In many cases big is good here, lots of contracts so looks "safe".
This is in part because no score is ever released related to prior delivery (ie, no central assessment record), and attempts to include it get tied up in process issues (ie, rights to respond, litigation) or claims it is subjective. It also overlaps with govt agency disfunction around scope and requirements and no govt manager wants a failed project, so everyone just sweeps them under the rug and keeps moving. It is crazy though, you are literally hiring the same HORRIBLE firms over and over.
What is PARAMOUNT is that you be willing spend absolute metric tons of UNPAID time responding to RFP's, have enough money in bank to lose 4 out of 5, be willing to go through 2 year RFP processes, be willing to agree to every item on the requirements lists filled with further buzzwords and "standards". This does NOT attract high performing companies, no competent engineer would even put up with this / sit through this. So you get body shop type consulting firms, using giant java framework and other solutions, and everything is insanely siloed.
The crazy pricing is often justified because the hassle in dealing with these contracts from a contract admin overhead can absolutely DWARF actual deliverables, and nothing has to be logical (and sometimes is not).
My recommendations here would be either:
a) just pay to bring stuff in house so you get cooperation, develop open source apps and prohibit any scope creep outside of absolute minimum needed until project is in operation. EVERY freaking agency hangs 100's of new requirements they never even used before onto these projects - solutions can be undeliverable and unusable as a result, for example 40 questions PER VACINNE SHOT here in California is the height of stupidity to make these idiots feel important.
b) pay for actual use / adoption, and let there be a somewhat free market. A lot of time the users of any govt system have ZERO input. Oddly, if they let agencies find their own solutions on a smaller scale, whatever you lose in "efficiency" by not having the megaproject (hint nothing - mega projects = disaster in govt land) you would see some natural winning solutions start to bubble up. I worked with an agency with a totally fantastic contract management / invoicing system, and I kept on wondering, holy hell, they actually got it right. I started to see other agencies use it in neighboring govts - it was great - people really liked it (super easy use, allowed users to do the google, Microsoft etc login even which is unheard of) and it was fast which is also rare.
But then someone convinced the head tech folks they should stomp on everything with the new and improved people. They actually had to roll back the mega project for another year (after years of dev) because it didn't even cover a fraction of what old systems easily did.