For a negotiated solicitation (and all A-76 studies should use a negotiated solicitation), the commercial offeror (i.e. a bidder) will submit a price proposal. There are two concerns. What will be the commercial offeror’s basis of his/her price proposal, and what will be the Government’s basis for accepting or rejecting that price proposal?

The Government most efficient organization (MEO) developers face the same problem as the potential commercial offerors; what is the basis for the MEO staffing and materials requirements? They could take the easy way; just bid the number of people they think are required. However, the preferred method is to take the specification and estimate the labor and material requirements on the specification. If the MEO team, as well as the offerors, cannot create a spreadsheet showing the deliverables, the anticipated occurrences of those deliverables during a typical year, the average labor hours to accomplish an occurrence, and the resulting number of annual labor hours, you do not have a biddable specification.

Each situation is different, even for the same products and services. You just can not assume an industry "professional" will know the effort required to provide your services to your expectations. They aren’t clairvoyant. Some say you can rely on requiring the potential commercial provider comply with "commercial" practices and standards. Do you know if those standards meet the standards you set for your operation? I don’t think you can rely on "commercial standards" and "professional" offerors to make up for a lack of workload definition in your A-76 study specification.

Another contracting opinion is the lack of quantifiable work effort data can be overcome by a rigorous review of the technical proposal and thorough communication with the "professional" offeror. First, the offeror has no real data to base a staffing plan. Second, the Government has no real data to judge that staffing offer. How many times will we have to go back and forth with the offerors to arrive at a comfortable offer?  Plus, if the Government accepts the offer, and subsequent contract experience proves that offer was not sufficient to meet our expectations, the Government shares in the insufficient offer. Again, you need projected workload data as the basis of the offer.

You are ready to write a biddable specification if :

a. Your function’s specific "contract deliverables" can be identified? These deliverables have finite, measurable outputs.

b. Your function’s current performance records identify the quantities and quality of your deliverables, such as:

• How many occurrences of each deliverable per year
• Labor hours per occurrence of the deliverables
• Schedules and response times
• Source of deliverable requirement inputs
• Deliverables accomplished by a work priority system

c. The level of expertise required to accomplish the deliverables is apparent from the available descriptions of the deliverables.

If the above is not the case, you are not ready to complete the specification, i.e. there is no basis for a bid or the MEO development.