The Advantages of the Advisory Down-Select Process

Author: Justin Lerma, ASI Government, LLC.

Introduction:

I first heard about a downselect in 2018. My first DITAP cohort was kicking off in a couple of months and I was given the equivalent of an oversized medical textbook as preparation material for instruction. When first reading about it, the idea seemed wholly obvious: trim down the number of respondents to a solicitation to reduce the burden, both mentally and financially, on the government and vendor. As it turns out, the idea wasn’t (isn’t) as obvious as I imagined.

Since 2018, I’ve taught about 14 cohorts, or 420-ish Contracting Officers, Specialists, and Program Managers, and about ? of them had no concept of the downselect. Today, there is a wealth of resources available to you to learn more about the two types of winnowing techniques available to you. And here’s another. However, I’ll do my best to differentiate this reading from what you might find elsewhere by shaping this article to answer the typical questions we get asked as DITAP instructors.

Let’s get started.

So, what is a downselect? Simply, it’s an evaluation technique that offers you the opportunity to reduce the number of proposals you may receive down to the most promising.?

Imagine this: your team has a requirement for program management support services worth $15 million. You’ve done some market research, issued an RFI, spoken with industry and you anticipate having 15 or more responses. Think about those 15 responses and about the effort it will take for an evaluation team to read 15 technical proposals, each clocking in at 25 pages a piece. I got tired just writing that sentence. But guess what? You do not have to live life that way. In using an advisory downselect, you still give every offeror a fair shot at competition, but you’re able to winnow down (in a firm or advisory way) those 15 proposals to those that can offer you the most value by adding in a less resource intensive phase prior to the full technical. In this first phase, the evaluation team may only need to read 15 five-page past performance white-papers, a much more approachable assessment, then downselect to a more manageable number of quality proposals from four or five vendors. In this case, you maximize competition by maximizing the quality of vendors for your work, thereby maximizing the amount of time your evaluation team can spend on their mission as opposed to reading proposals from less qualified vendors.

Keep in mind, this is not a competitive range, and I encourage you to not allow any part of the acquisition team (program, legal, other contract folks) to impose the idea of a competitive range on the downselect. As you begin to sell the team, or yourself, on the use of this method, remember that the point of this method is to reduce the burden on your eval team at each phase by identifying only the best contenders for your work. And, as a bonus, the method reduces the burden of the proposal process on vendors who may have less of a chance to win the work. I

What is The History of The Technique? I’ve been looking for historical insight on this technique’s use, however, I can’t say I’ve found something concrete yet. However, my colleague, Will Roberts, did provide some info out of James F. Nagle’s book, “A History of Government Contracting”, related to the first use of Sealed-Bidding, which goes back to pre-constitution days. In late 1780, Robert Morris (superintendent of finance for the newly confederated states and the first “official “contracting officer) began devising processes to maximize competition between contractors supplying the Continental Army. His push for a competitive, sealed bid approach was founded on his goals to drive prices down and increase the number of proposals. With such a rich history, it shouldn’t be a surprise that variations on this practice are widely used today. The PIL, DOC, NSF, DOE, DoD, and the IRS are just a few of the agencies that have successfully performed a downselect of some type. I’ve even seen articles about how the practice will be a requirement at some agencies, though hopefully only when they will be most effective.

What types of downselects are there? There are two ways to deownselect: Firm and Advisory.

Firm: With the intention of improving the quality of competition for your work, in the Firm Downselect, you are firmly reducing your number of bids by removing vendors from competition. In this case, you’d have a less resource intensive first phase (we will talk about what makes a good first round good shortly) as described earlier, after which you will send notices to unsuccessful offerors to remove them from further competition. This may sound terrifying, most people have the protest alarms blaring in their heads, but there is a place for everything. In this case, should you be buying under an IDIQ, under $10 million for the fed. (or $25 mill for DoD), where protests aren’t possible (assuming you haven’t gone outside of your scope) the firm downselect may be a great option and those alarm bells should be quelling. However, performing this type of method outside of these circumstances means the bidder will have the ability to protest in the first phase because you, the government, have decided to pull them out of the running (stay tuned for the magic of the advisory downselect). This can of course lead to a full-stop on your competition, extend your PALT, and probably make everyone even more fearful of new-ish techniques.

Advisory: Remember the point of a downselect is to get to the bids that have the best chance of working in your environment. What makes an advisory downselect advisory, is, well, the advising. In that first round of proposals, your eval team will identify a pool of bids that have the best chance of succeeding and advise that group to continue in the competition. Similarly, all other bidders will be advised to not continue as their chances of winning are slim. Notice I’ve repeated said the words “advising” or “advised” and not “telling” or “cutting”. This is key, because we aren’t performing a formal cut-off. We are simply telling folks that we don’t believe they have the highest chances of winning. Now, before you start thinking that vendors that have been advised against continuing will stay in the competition any way, or you have experience where this very thing happened, stay tuned, I’ll be discussing that in a moment as well, but long-story short, almost always, these vendors will self-select themselves out of the competition. Also, unlike the in the Firm variation, because you’ve only advised during the first phase, there is no risk of a protest since you aren’t removing anyone from the competition. Additionally, any vendors who do not submit a phase two proposal will not have protest ability since they are no longer an interested party.

What are the Benefits of a Downselect? When we’re asked this, I believe folks are really asking me if they will save time and money if they go this route. The ultimate answer is yes, but initially it’s not going to feel that way.

The downselect sort of forces you into a phased approach. Luckily, you get to decide how many phases you have, but the idea of going out to industry, waiting for responses, evaluating bids, sending out notices, waiting, then getting final bids sounds like a lot. To some extent it is, however, think about how long it may take to read a 20-page technical proposal from 8, 9, or 10 bidders. At ASI Government, our team has submitted several responses to solicitations and usually don’t hear back for 60 days (sometimes five months!). Vendors are already expecting this kind of long timeline. When you engage in a downselect, you start to upset expectations and pleasantly surprise industry!

The PIL has a great video that gives a sample timeline for this method, noted below:

Day 0 – Solicitation Release

Day 10 – Phase One Proposal Submitted

Days 11 to19 – Government Evaluates

Day 20 – Notices to Offerors

Day 45 – Phase Two Proposal Submitted

Days 47 to 50 – Oral Presentations

Days 51 to 54 – Evaluation and Documentation

Days 55 to 59 – Reviews

Day 60 – Award

This is a great example timeline and if you wanted to shorten it even more, there is certainly room to do so. For example, maybe you perform on-the-spot consensus and leverage bullet points for you documentation (don’t roll your eyes, it does work and is defensible) and reduce the eval/documentation phase and reviews by a week.?

What you gain from this process, even if the timeline doesn’t seem all that much shorter, is that your last phase of evaluation will be performed on a smaller subset of bids than the traditional way. However, there are a few things you need to be aware of:

1. Phase One should be important enough to distinguish bidders but NOT a huge technical proposal. Look at 5-page past experience write ups, a concept of delivery, etc. If you push for something lengthy, keep in mind the cost associated with putting a large proposal together (often in the $100K range for 20-25 pages) will cause a vendor to continue with the competition even if they have been advised against it. Essentially, you lose the value of a downselect by insisting on an intensive first phase.
2. You need to get vendors TIME to think about proceeding in an advisory downselect. DO NOT send notices on Monday afternoon and expect a response the next day before noon. Also, please don’t send out an email on Friday and expect an answer Monday morning. Everyone will more than likely opt-in at this point because they haven’t really had time to digest your feedback and make an appropriate decision. 48 hours is great. 72 hours is better.
3. This ties into the bullet above, you need to give some more TIME to vendors between when Phase 1 is done, and Phase 2 proposals are due. Notice in the schedule above there are 35 days between phase 1 submission and phase 2’s due date. This does of course include a 7-day window for Notices to go out, but this time means vendors have time. If you only put 14 days between the two phases, more than likely vendors will have begun their phase two proposal in preparation of notices. That means they’ve spent money, probably a lot of money, and regardless of your advice, they will proceed in competition.?

As an aside, once during a discussion on the benefits of a downselect and how the method can save time and money, a CO told me that vendors spending money to win business was just, “the cost of doing business.” That is a terrible way to look at the vendor/government dynamic. The costs undertaken by a vendor to respond to RFIs, a Sources Sought, and RFP/Qs are going to find their way to the government and the taxpayer. So, in performing a technique like this, you are increasing your stewardship of tax-payer dollars. That’s the way to view this. You can do yourself and vendors a whole lot of good by advising early in the process to save time (for you and the eval team) and money (for the government and vendor).

While we do believe time is saved and value is improved using this technique, the breadth of protest does reduce slightly as well. Some folks believe that those vendors who were advised in phase 1 to not proceed still have protest rights at the end of phase 2 or 3. Please note, this is not the case. The moment phase 2 begins and an offeror does not submit a bid, they are no longer an interested party. Additionally, if using the advisory variant, you’ve only advised the vendor to not proceed. They have made the decision to stand back, again, reducing your protest risk. I’d like to take a moment and say one of my colleagues is writing an article on debriefings and how they have helped continue to reduce protest risk in conjunction with various buying techniques. I will link here when that piece is up.

Can I get some sample language to use? Yes, of course. While I will provide a few items here, the Periodic Table of Acquisition Innovations is a great place to look for examples. A link is provided here: https://www.fai.gov/periodic-table?

There are improvements I’d make on all of these, but that’s just me. These are absolutely great examples you can base your writing on. In future pieces, we will dissect a few examples and provide more commentary.

Thanks for reading!

Example 1:?

Instructions Phase 1 – Demonstrated Prior Experience (Factor 1)?

The Offeror shall submit a written submission, totaling no more than five (5) pages, detailing their experience by addressing each of the three bullets/topics below. The Offeror must be certified at Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) DEV level 3.?

o Submit three (3) recent (within the last 5 years) examples of relevant (similar scope and complexity with a minimum contract dollar value of $10 million) prior experience references highlighting their experience in delivering and/or developing successful modernization solutions. One of the prior experiences must be related to federal grants management system implementation. Please include information on the Offeror’s role (prime/sub), Total Contract Value (TCV), Offeror’s portion of the TCV, and the FTE count. Please provide the reference contact information (name, phone number, email).?

If Offeror determines that they have not performed any contracts that are relevant to this solicitation, they should indicate this. – Max 3 Pages

o Provide sufficient information and examples regarding Offeror’s agile methodology and process and how that methodology and process supported in meeting modernization objectives of the organizations. Explain how you helped the organization overcome functional and organizational challenges, mitigated risks, and ultimately delivered successful solutions with measurable business outcomes (e.g., improved customer satisfaction, lowered operating costs, increased digital interactions). – Max 1 Page?

o Describe Offeror’s experience in implementing a modernized solution where modules are developed on the new platform iteratively while retiring the legacy system's corresponding modules. Both solutions will co-exist until the legacy is completely migrated and decommissioned. What are the challenges and potential mitigation in this implementation approach? – Max 1 Page?

Example 2:?

Advisory Down-select?

The Department will evaluate the Phase 1 (Factor 1) submissions and provide advisory notifications to vendors. For those offerors that are rated most highly and advised to proceed to Phase II of the quote submission process, the Contracting Officer will include the Phase II submission instructions on the advisory notification, including the date, time and exact location of the Quoter’s scheduled oral presentation. Offerors who were not among the most highly rated will be advised that they are unlikely to be viable competitors, along with the general basis for the Department’s advisory recommendation. The intent of this advice is to minimize quote development costs for those Offerors with little to no chance of receiving an award.?

The Department intends to provide no more than 5 Offerors with an advisory notification to proceed. However, the Department’s advice will be a recommendation only, and those Offerors who are advised not to proceed may elect to continue their participation in the procurement.?

The Government does not intend to provide debriefings after the completion of the advisory down select notifications. Failure to participate in Phase I of the procurement precludes further consideration of an Offeror. Phase 2 submissions will not be accepted from Offerors who have not submitted Phase 1 quotes by the due date and time stated in this solicitation. For those Offerors that are rated most highly and advised to proceed to Phase 2 of the quote submission process, the Contracting Officer will include the Phase 2 submission instructions on the advisory notification, including the date, time, and exact location of the Offerors scheduled demo. The Department recommends Offerors begin preparation of Phase 2 quotes only after receipt of the Phase 1 advisory down-select notice.?

Those Quoters that received advisory notification not to proceed to Phase II, but regardless choose to proceed to Phase II, shall send an email to …… not later than 48 hours after receipt of the advisory recommendation not to proceed, indicating its intent to participate in Phase II.?

Example 3:?

M.2.2 Phase I, Criteria 2: Prior Demonstrated Experience?

The Government will assess its confidence that the Quoter will successfully perform the work, by evaluating the Quoter's demonstrated experience from three contracts/orders performed within the past five (5) years (from the date of this RFQ release). Prior experience will be evaluated to assess the expectation of successful outcomes based on the extent to which the Quoter has successfully performed on systems similar to the portal requirements described in the Statement of Work. The Government will also evaluate the relevance of the Quoter’s demonstrated prior experience to the SOW technical and business solution, and successful execution of agile processes, modern technology, and user experience design.?

M.2.3 Phase I - Criteria 3: Resumes of Proposed Key Personnel?

The Government will assess the extent to which the Quoter identifies and commits Key Personnel with appropriate experience and qualifications and will be assigned a confidence rating. Resumes will be evaluated based on the currency, quality and depth of experience of individual personnel working on similar projects (size, scope, magnitude, duration, and complexity?

M.2.4 Phase I, Criteria 4 –Staffing?

The Quoter’s staffing plan will be evaluated based upon the degree to which the Quoter demonstrates the ability to recruit, hire and retain and develop qualified staff.?

The staffing plan will also be evaluated based on the strength of the Quoter’s OEM certification training process that its personnel receive, maintaining of professional credentials and the continuing learning opportunities available to its personnel?