GSA Blog

Making Progress on GSA’s New Services Best-in-Class Multi-Agency Contract

In this December 15, 2020 blog post, I shared that GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) is establishing a broader and more flexible next generation services best-in-class multi-agency contract to improve how agencies buy services. The new best-in-class multi-agency contract is one of several efforts under the umbrella of the Services Marketplace - a collective of contract offerings and initiatives designed to improve services acquisition across the federal government.

The goals of the next generation services contract are to:

• Deliver a simpler buying experience for increasingly complex services procurements.
• Reduce friction in the procurement process.
• Meet best-in-class contract requirements, and improve government oversight and management of spend, contract and subcontract performance, and small business participation.
• Position the federal government to reduce contract duplication and to achieve significant burden reduction for both government and industry.

As we work to establish the new best-in-class multi-agency contract contract program, we are committed to making data driven decisions based on in-depth analysis of federal services spend, as well as input, feedback, and insight from all stakeholders. Customer agencies’ needs are serving as the foundation for our acquisition strategy, the contract’s scope, and the fair opportunity construct; while industry feedback and input on their needs is being gathered through focus groups, industry days and input from industry associations.

To that end, we have:

• Conducted surveys, held listening sessions, and met with contracting personnel and Senior Procurement Executives from more than 10 federal agencies. We have gained input on how our acquisition strategy, scope and ordering methodology can best meet their needs.They told us what they like and don’t like about our existing services contracts and what features we need to include to truly deliver a simpler buying experience. We appreciate their candor and honesty that will serve as the foundation for the new best-in-class multi-agency contract’s acquisition strategy.
• Held listening sessions with more than 30 small and large industry partners nominated by the Professional Services Council, the Coalition for Government Procurement, ACT IAC and the Small and Emerging Contractors Advisory Forum (SECAF). They too provided candid feedback about their experiences when onboarding to new IDIQs, offering suggestions from their experience with other contracts to help shape concepts around small business strategies, contract organization, and source selection criteria. All of the groups expressed their appreciation of GSA’s approach to include them early in the decision making process to help make the contract better.

We are grateful for the input from the federal acquisition community and industry we have received to date.

We issued the first request for information (RFI) for the new contract program on beta.SAM.gov on March 2, 2021. The RFI will seek feedback on the fundamental considerations regarding the proposed scope, structure and evaluation criteria of the contract. This will likely be the first of several RFIs over the next few months as we finalize the acquisition strategy by end of Fiscal Year 2021. On April 1, 2021, we will hold a virtual Industry Day to share the RFI and market research findings to date, address industry questions, and outline the next steps in this process.

We look forward to more interactive conversations in the months to come and will continue to provide updates on FAS’s Professional Services Interact site and here on GSA.gov. You may also email questions to PSHC-dev@gsa.gov.