Written by: Ron Trettau

The long delayed ALLIANT 2 RFP will be released soon. Unless you want to miss out on the largest and most lucrative IT contract to be released this decade, you need to get on top of this right now. The Government spends over four billion dollars a year on the current ALLIANT contract, and there is reason to believe this amount will continue to grow when ALLIANT 2 is awarded a little over a year from now.

The Level of Effort to Bid ALLIANT 2 RFP

ALLIANT is easier to bid than most GWACS of similar value. Easier doesn’t mean easy. Our estimate is that about eight person weeks of effort is needed. This is given average field conditions and skilled proposal personnel. Due to long lead items, this timeframe is spread over four or so months. The difficult pieces are building a quality team, preparing responsive past performance, and doing a competent Price to Win (PTW) study. Finding the right teammates gets more difficult as time passes. Depending on your records, preparing past performance can range from relatively straightforward to nearly impossible. And no one outside of a mental hospital would want to bid without a PTW study.

The Competitive Field

The current ALLIANT contract was awarded to 80 small business and 50 full and open primes. The latest projection is that the government will award up to 80 contracts to small business and 60 unrestricted Primes. If you want to be one of these awardees, the time is now. Not all Primes have performed well on ALLIANT, so they will not win ALLIANT 2. If you are a small business, there are even more opportunities. Many current small business Primes no longer qualify under the NAICS code. If you can field a good team and prepare a good proposal, you could be awarded an ALLIANT 2 contract. However, starting too late can be a fatal flaw. GSA expects upwards of 200 proposals, and they do not want to read all of them. The first thing they will do is check for compliance and throw out all non-compliant proposals; we can help you ensure your proposal is compliant.

The latest draft of the ALLIANT 2 RFPs, both small business and unrestricted, were released in October 2015 and are available on FedBizOpps.gov. Final RFPs will be released very soon, possibly within a matter of weeks. If you want to participate, the time to think about it is over; the time to act is now. The business size standard for the ALLIANT 2 SB GWAC will be based on the SBA size standards for NAICS 541512, Computer Systems Design Services. That size standard is $27.5M. Anyone who does not fit in this size standard will have to bid the unrestricted RFP or subcontract to another Prime. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are so many task orders released under ALLIANT that no Prime can bid them alone, and; most Primes make extensive use of subcontractors to bid task orders. If you chose not to prime this yourself, we can help you get a position on a winning team.

Where Should You Be Now

By now you should have analyzed the documentation provided by GSA as a part of the draft RFP and begun work on the past performance templates and rating forms. You should also be working on the document verification and self-scoring worksheet to ensure you have the proper documentation available when the final ALLIANT 2 RFP is released and so you are ready to prepare the proposal. Without starting early, there is little hope you can win a contract, because there is too much work to do for you to successfully complete during the proposal period. Analyze the labor categories and rate ranges provided to ensure you can provide the personnel and have the correct price to win. OCI can help you with every step of the process to ensure that you are ready when the final ALLIANT 2 RFP is released.

You may be able to write a winning proposal without any outside help but this is the year for IDIQ’s so outsourcing will give you the best opportunity to win. Unfortunately, the problem with Government RFPs is that they are never released on schedule and many may be released at the same time, which makes it almost impossible to do it all in-house. OCI has access to many qualified consultants who have worked on previous iterations of the IDIQ’s scheduled to be released this year, including Alliant 2. Competition will be fierce, don’t wait until the last minute to prepare for busy season, give us a call today or click here to discuss your current or upcoming needs.