Office Awardee List: $2.4B VA Secure, Performant, Reliable, and User-Centered Experiences (SPRUCE) IDIQ

Awards have been made to the following 10 companies:

• Agile Six Applications
• Aquia Nava II JV (Aquia | Nava )
• Magnum Opus (MO Studio)
• Rise8
• Coforma
• Peregrine Digital Services JV (IronArch Technology and Ad Hoc)
• Oddball
• AVB Digital II JV (Vaultes and Bixal Solutions)
• One Phoenix Solutions JV (Wisdom Tree Technologies,OneGlobe and Phoenix Cyber)
• Bravo Communications Services JV (American Communications Solutions – Managing Member)

See The VA Announcement Here

Background

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Secure, Performant, Reliable, and User-Centered Experiences (SPRUCE) is a frictionless vehicle through which VA can acquire top-quality professionals and industry partners to deliver exceptional user experiences. The SPRUCE Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract connects VA employees with best-in class industry partners to deliver high-quality digital products in accordance with Office of Information Technology (OIT) Working Principles. OIT Working Principles:

• Embrace “Better, Faster, Safer” – Deliver more value by building momentum through continuous, incremental, well-tested changes.
• Automate When Possible – Adapt out processes, our organization, and our technology to automate away manual, error-prone, and tedious work.
• Deliver What Matters – Maximize results for Veterans by working with our users and stakeholders to prioritize work based on what will drive the biggest impact to the outcomes that matter.
• Encourage a Safe and Transparent Culture of Learning – Nurture and build a culture around exploration, collaboration, and innovation – all while celebrating success along the way.
• Trust and Empower Focused Teams of Experts – Foster empowered teams of specialists to take ownership of their products and services.
• Standardize and Re-Use – Create an organization that collaborates on winning approaches, reuses processes and technology, and maximizes shared knowledge and resources.

SPRUCE supports VA’s digital modernization initiatives by ensuring VA has streamlined access to the modern commercial services required to deliver excellent products to VA’s internal and external users. Successfully delivering such products often requires VA to obtain commercial delivery services supported by teams with capabilities in: Software development and operation; Technical advising and architecture planning; Service design and user research studies; Data
science and data analytics; Product support operations. The objective of this effort is to provide VA with a method to obtain such delivery services. Specifically, SPRUCE will meet the following goals:

1. Give VA streamlined access to exceptional companies that specialize in the development of digital services using modern technologies.
2. Create a contract mechanism that promotes rapid delivery, applying private sector best practices, and measurable outcomes.
3. Scale the success accomplished in the current Customer Experience, DevOps and Agile Releases (CEDAR) IDIQ while expanding access to exceptional vendors with more diverse skillsets and enabling larger task orders as appropriate.
4. Ensure VA can rapidly adopt commercial technology and design-industry best practices such as those described in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) Digital Services Playbook.

This effort is consistent with several initiatives to strengthen Federal technology and acquisition practices including but not limited to:

1. The March 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy, which focused on ensuring a defensible, resilient digital economy where it is costlier to attack systems than defend them, where sensitive or private information is secure and protected, and where neither incidents nor errors cascade into catastrophic, systemic consequences. Ultimately, technology companies and software manufacturers must be held accountable for the safety and security of the products and devices delivered to the Government.
2. The Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government of December 2021 focused on increasing the quality and equity of customer experiences with Government services.
3. The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act of December 2018 aimed to improve the digital experience for government customers and reinforce existing requirements for federal public websites.
4. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy’s (OFPP’s) December 2017 memo encouraging strategic sourcing and strategies to drive performance such as developing common standards and practices in contracts.
5. The Digital Services Playbook, released by OMB in August 2014, as a best-practices guide for agencies to use when developing effective digital services.
6. The TechFAR Handbook, released by OFPP in August 2014, as a guide to the procurement of agile design and development services within the Information Technology (IT) Consulting, IT Outsourcing, and IT Security Categories.

Scope
The SPRUCE IDIQ contract vehicle will provide VA with commercial, streamlined delivery services and teams. The contractor(s) shall provide VA with expert teams that shall consistently deliver viable digital solutions in support of VA’s strategic mission and objectives. The specific nature of the capabilities required for each team will be articulated at the Task Order level. However, it is expected that a typical delivery team requested under the SPRUCE IDIQ will require multi-disciplinary teams with members having expertise in: software development and operations, technical advising and architecture planning, service design and user research studies, data science and data analytics, and product support operations (task orders may include multiple functional areas). Task Orders will be limited to a total value of $50M, including options. SPRUCE will have a total ordering ceiling of $2,442,037,228.80.

See the solicitation here: VA Secure, Performant, Reliable, and User-Centered Experiences (SPRUCE) – IDIQ (VA-23-00053369)

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