General Services Administration Strategic Plan

Quantified Perception is analyzing various department and agency strategic plans to provide a touch of insight into their priorities and focus, based up their own descriptions, The GSA Strategic Plan for 2014 – 2018 was published in March of this year, and provides insight into the direction Administrator Dan Tangherlini is giving to his troops.

The GSA Strategic Plan (GSASP) is a 17-page document of about 2500 words detailing the strategic and management objectives of the four major operating divisions and 11 regional offices of GSA, which accounts for more than $60 billion in annual transactions.

Semantic analysis of the GSASP shows the most common words and phrases that reflect the Administrator’s priorities. The most common words used are listed below:

WORD	Occurrences
technology/technologies	25
customer/customers	18
information	16
improve	15
business	14
innovation/innovative	14
reduce	14
acquisition	13
deliver	13
solutions	12
operations	11
savings	11

Common phrases used in the GSASP:

For more information on the Quantified Perception analysis, contact info@qpllc.com

ICE ICM Acquisition

DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of the CIO released an amendment to the TECS Investigative Case Management (ICM) on Jun 17. Interested bidders should take apply some analytics to developing their compliance matrix, as the Statement of Objectives – dated May 1, 2014 – has some interesting parameters.

Quantified Perception has examined the SOO language and developed word and phase counts. The most common substantive word in the 11,000 word SOO is “system,” with 275 occurrences. OK, no big deal, it’s a system acquisition, but the QPL Frequency Index of nearly 24 makes that a bit unusual.

The next most frequent word is “shall” with 172 occurrences, a frequency index of almost 15. That’s a lot of requirements! Indeed, the word “requirements” has an index of 4.7, with 54 occurrences.

Other high-use words of note include “”subject” (90 occurrences), “support” (40), and “solution” (31). There are some clues to the acquisition intentions in the word frequencies.

Quantified Perception’s phrase analysis supports the massive compliance challenge: “System shall” (62 occurrences) and “offeror shall” (42) mean the successful bid not only has to state compliance but also make sure it is easily verified by the evaluation team. Quantified Perception suggests adding a compliance table as a proposal appendix to make it easy for the evaluators to find each requirement.

Two high frequency terms for proposal emulation are “subject,” to indicate a case subject record (“subject record(s)” is used 50 times in the SOO) and “correlation ID”, used a dozen times. Successful offerors will ensure they validate their language with the SOO terminology.

Why LPTA Makes Sense for government

You want to buy a widget. Or you want someone to run your widget farm.

You can’t just go pick a widget vendor, or a widget services provider. Rules require that you ask for anyone who is in the widget business to “Make me an offer.”

And so you get five, or ten, or fifty widget proposals. Each promises to give you the best widget, with the best possible widget results. How can you tell them apart?

The IT marketplace is large but finite. All vendors operate in the same technology space – same platforms, same software, same operating systems.  Most are within the same labor market, paying the same wages and salaries to attract and retain staff. So any IT solution pretty much looks the same. Procurement officials can eliminate offers that are obviously incompetent, but mostly the suppliers look pretty vanilla from the outside. Some bidders use proposal templates from third-party proposal support companies, so the proposals literally look identical. The main differences are in how good the proposal writing team is at their job…and they won’t be involved in actually delivering the services. Do you believe the proposal that uses the most superlatives?

Or is more effective to just pare down to those who appear competent and pick the lowest price? After all, saying you have the best management approach doesn’t make it so.

No one ever got in trouble for picking lowest price.