“Evolve Care Package” for creating a high-scoring proposal

The U.S. Department of State (DOS) Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) is about to release its $10B Evolve IDIQ. The bid is highly competitive—hundreds of companies showed interest during DOS’ industry day—while DOS is only likely to award 36 Evolve contracts.

Evolve stage gates

DOS is looking to eliminate low performers early in the competition and has set up two stage gates. In Stage 1, companies must pass DOS’ evaluation of their past performance, corporate experience, and information provided on the “go/no go” information sheets. Companies passing Stage 1 continue to Stage 2, where the competition increases. Companies must make two oral presentations in response to an unknown technical challenge and a management approach.

DOS will use the Best Value-Tradeoff source selection process defined in FAR 15.101-1 (Tradeoff Process) to make the award. For non-price factors, DOS will consider the strengths, weaknesses, and deficiencies associated with your bid. DOS will rate it according to a four-factor confidence rating scale: High Confidence, Some Confidence, Low Confidence, and Unacceptable.

To score highly, you should score numerous strengths across all evaluated areas, demonstrate a thorough understanding of the work, and propose a sound and low-risk approach with proof points.

Technical presentation

If you advance to Stage 2, developing a cohesive team to address the oral presentations will take time and practice. Your technical team must solve and present a response to an unknown question in 90 minutes. During the presentation, the team must show strengths across all evaluation criteria, as well as:

• Cohesiveness as they develop a response on the spot to the challenge question.
• Insights into the problem and how they are solving it.
• How they will approach the challenge.
• How they demonstrate competent research and independent critical thinking skills.
• Innovation—and balance the cost, value, and time variables.

Management approach

The management team must present their approach in 20 minutes, which includes introducing their team and presenting their management approach. DOS will rate them on criteria that include:

• Approach and methodologies for planning, executing, tracking, invoicing, and reporting and sound and logical business practices.
• Use of industry and ITIL best practices to track and report performance.
• Implementation of continuous improvement to gain efficiencies.
• Meeting cost, schedule, and performance objectives.
• Approach for managing multiple task orders (TOs).
• Tools and methodologies for planning team activities and a resource-loaded schedule.
• Scheduling, organizing, and deploying resources, controlling task execution, and risk mitigation.
• Governance and reporting structure.
• Processes to identify issues/outages and take corrective action.

Lohfeld Consulting Evolve Care Package

To assist teams working on this Evolve bid, Lohfeld Consulting created an Evolve Care Package:

• We have proposal experts who can help you develop and review your proposal and orals coaches who can help develop, coach, and review your oral presentations.
• We have links to blogs and presentations that can facilitate the development of your responses:
  • Increase Your Confidence Rating Score Blog
  • Planning and delivering winning orals presentations Part 1 webinar replay.
  • Planning and delivering winning orals presentations Part 2 webinar replay.
  • 20 tips for conducting smooth client demos and oral presentations

For more info about how we can assist your Evolve proposal development efforts, please contact Brenda Crist at BCrist@LohfeldConsulting.com.