Ken Blair

While you are off-site, study up on how to win a place at the table on the DIA SITE III contract.

DIA SITE III Background:

After a run of nearly five years, E-SITE will be sun downed in December of 2020, and DIA has released the draft RFP for the follow-on contracting effort called SITE III. SITE III is a combination of E-SITE with other contracts.

SITE III will be an IDIQ contract. While E-SITE had an estimated value of $6B, GovWin gives a $12B estimate for SITE III. The government has stated they intend to award to “each Qualifying Offeror.”

The draft SOW identifies the following task areas:

  • Enterprise Activities and Services— a broad brush of activities to include assessment and evaluation, testing, project management and planning logistical support, including configuration management. Also included in this area is knowledge management, enterprise operations and ITSM
  • Infrastructure Development/Sustainment (six task areas)— life cycle support, service desk, and desk side and field services support; connectivity and network services; enterprise computing, storage, and cloud services, and mission and business systems services; unified communications; audio visual and digital media services; enterprise operations, event monitoring and management and performance
  • Application Development/Sustainment (two task areas)— customer outreach and relationship management, mission engagement and operations planning and customer education and training; software engineering development, and integration, application tool development to include web and portal systems development and sustainment, data analytics; knowledge management, maintenance of development and test environments, and lifecycle software license management
  • Infrastructure/Application Development and Sustainment (two task areas)— support services for outside technical support, callout/per call services, and deployment support; cybersecurity services

There are a few wrinkles with the required services:

  • The prime contractor must hold a Top Secret facility clearance at the time of proposal submission while subs can hold a Secret facility clearance
  • Contractor experience is limited to those have Intelligence Community (IC) experience
  • The Government will use a multi-step, pass/fail evaluation on eight response areas. Failure of any one area will result in loss of award

An interesting twist to the RFP is the use of scenarios for the relevant experience response. Large businesses must provide relevant experience for each of the four scenarios (a citation may be used for multiple scenarios). Small business must provide experience for a minimum of two scenarios. The scenarios are broken down as follows:

  • Infrastructure Scenario #1 — Customer Facing Requirements: Help/Service Desk, Desk Side Support, Endpoint Devices
  • Infrastructure Scenario #2 — Backend Infrastructure and Cybersecurity (Servers, Storage, Cloud, Monitoring, Network
  • Application Scenario #1 — New Software Application Development, Accreditation, Integration, and Deployment
  • Application Scenario #2 — Operation and Maintenance of Applications

Each scenario has different levels of size and scope requirements based upon business size. It’s expected these requirements could limit the number of small businesses that may qualify for award.  Nearly all the current 49 incumbents are large business. And there is no set-aside area.

Status:

Questions were due 4/10/2020 for the latest draft. To date, the Government has answered more than 700 questions, providing numerous clarifications. Per GovWin, the Government expects to release the final solicitation about April 23rdwith responses due on May 27th. Given the last set of question were due on 4/10, anticipate that the 4/23 date could slip to the right. The slip will probably be slight given the fact that current task orders end the end of December of this year. The anticipated award/contract start date is November 1stof this year.

Considerations for bidding:

The main considerations for bidding are that an offeror, as the prime, hold a Top Secret facility clearance (pending does NOT count) and have IC experience. A critical requirement, especially for small businesses, will be meeting the size and scope requirements for the relevant experience areas (scenarios).

Conclusion:

If you haven’t been tracking the SITE III opportunity it’s not too late, particularly if you have a track record of performing similar tasks and hold a Top Secret facility clearance.

Errata:

GovWin Opportunity ID:            175366

Beta.SAM.Gov Notice ID:         2020-005-SITEIII

Help Winning:  OCI consultants have experience in E-SITE and DIA. We can provide any type of proposal staffing as well as a Proposal Readiness Review, offering an outside view of how a company’s quals compare to the requirements.

Take a look at our earlier blog post about SITE III:  Insight into Winning a $12B SITE III Contract IDIQ