CMS RFI: Information Systems Foundational Components Support – MRAS

Notice ID:  none posted

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) seeks an effective contractor to develop foundational components, common infrastructure templates, tools, DevSecOps best practices and services for quality systems built and supported by the Information Systems Group (ISG) of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ). The goal of this team is to make ISG’s software development and DevSecOps more effective and efficient by building reusable code, providing tools and automation, monitoring site health, alerting, trouble-shooting incidents, debugging performance through distributed tracing, and searching through application and system logs. Resulting in cost savings and efficiencies where possible in our systems.

Scope

With ISG LOB products workloads being spread across multiple ADOs and development teams, CMS has identified a need to address common pain points associated with the program. As part of the development process, different teams expend duplicate effort by solving similar problems, which has caused inconsistency in quality and delivery approach. For example, teams spend a lot of time and effort getting their code to meet deployment checklist requirements that are common to all teams. In general, the common pain points we have identified fall into categories such as incident response, identifying security threats, development process efficiency, and system observability. Existing development teams do not have enough bandwidth to speed up their deployment pipelines, effectively train and prepare for incidents, track and update security threats, set up and configure in-depth monitoring and logging, and a wide variety of other potential tasks that may yet arise and are foundational for an effective engineering process. Therefore, we have identified the continued need for an ISG Foundational Components support team to focus on developing, executing, and coordinating shared solutions to address these common pain points.

CMS is looking for the awarded contractor to establish small and effective teams to work with, and across all of these existing development teams to ensure the overall success of the ISG program across ISG’s objectives, as listed in section 2.1 Objectives. Post award, these teams will work in collaboration with the CMS Technical Leadership, Solution Management Team (SMT) and CMS Product Managers (PMs) to prioritize among and within ISG’s objectives, conduct user research with development teams understand existing pain points, build automated monitoring and visibility for the program success metrics, and establish a roadmap and backlog of technical user stories to improve overall Security, Stability, Reliability, Scalability, Usability, Quality and Efficiency of ISG Quality Systems. CMS is also looking for teams to drive innovation and pave the way for other LOBs struggling with capacity issues. This paving the way may come in the form of identifying new technologies or services that would enhance current LOB processes, presenting them to LOB SMT for approval, presenting these technologies to the ISG Technical Direction Board (TDB) for approval and to the Approved Technology Portfolio (ATP), and then presenting at meetings such as the ISG All-Hands or QualityNet (QNet) Chat to announce the intent and efficiencies of the new technology/service.

CMS requests Offerors to propose multiple FC teams to support multiple ISG LOBs as firm-fixed price (FFP) CLINs for performing the work as stated in this SOO. Historically, this CMS requirement has leveraged small high performing teams, most consisting of 6-8 highly technical individuals. CMS requests Offerors to justify their reasoning around their proposed staffing plan. We would expect these resources to primarily be very experienced and talented DevOps, Security, Cloud and Site Reliability/Platform engineers, with some Project Management support. The ideal team members can define and solve unconstrained problems, write code, and know how and when to make trade-offs when building systems.

It is important to note that CMS expect these FC teams to be fluid across ISG LOBs. Resources from one team should be able to immediately relocate to another team per the program need. Additionally, one LOB can be supported by exactly one FC team or by multiple FC teams depending on the size and need of the LOB. Similarly in some instances one team may be asked to support more than one LOBs or as an Enterprise FC team to support the ISG QNet holistically.

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