Our first federal solicitation

As a customer experience shop, we are always interested in how interacting with businesses feels. From the cul-de-sacs to the break throughs, walking a mile (or three or four) in your customers’ shoes is wildly valuable to any organization.

This month, the ex-Feds at Ishmael Interactive got to walk just those miles, when we submitted our first response to a federal call-for-work, also known as a solicitation. From being feds who might receive emails from private companies, we’’re now standing on the other side, and it is fascinating to experience what it’s like.

Solicitations can run to dozens or even hundreds of pages and detail everything that business leads and the Contracting Officer know to be necessary for the fulfillment of a contract. As the legal basis for years of work, their granularity and consistency is both crucial and crippling, since no one wants to go into a contract without a clear understanding of what’s expected, but no one can predict the future, either. For this reason, federal solicitations are a high-wire act of detail and breadth, predictability and wild conjecture.

Coming to a federal solicitation from years of federal employment, this process felt familiar: there was clear-yet-dense prose that weighted every bullet point and demanded the line-by-line responses; there were ten plus amendments; there were dozens of administrative requirements. Most people degenerate these items as “hoops” or dismiss them as “bureaucratic” and time-wasting. What those people misunderstand is that those details are part of the test. If you can’t get those details right, if you’re not scrupulous or passionate enough to care, you’re not going to be a good fit for this work. In short, you have to want a federal job. You have to want a federal contract. And you have to want it enough to respect the process.

To all of those points: we do.

After using a Python script to pare down over 90,000 solicitations on sam.gov to a tight 12, and the further down to a readable 3, we landed on a single solicitation to respond to. The problem: it was due a week after we identified it. There was no way we could make it, but we lucked out when the deadline was extended by six days.

We put our heads down and grinded, working 30 hours on this response alone in a single week, on top of our other work. I produced 92 pages of response; Aaron organized that into 12 pages of response and 80 pages of appendices. I used my track pad so much, so hard, that I injured myself and it took six days of running to work it out. We had calls multiple times on the Saturday before submission. We were racing, because as Aaron says: if you submit on the last day, you’re one thunderstorm away from the internet going down and missing the deadline. In the end, we submitted two days early, just to be safe.

In the middle of this process, I didn’t see the point in going on. We almost certainly will not get this contract or any piece of it. The big contractors have dedicated staff just to read and respond to these contracts; they have connections and years of evidence that their processes work well enough.

But I did keep going, because I know that on the other side of that solicitation is a group of feds who need our expertise in customer experience, human-centered design, and data wrangling. I know that we have good services to offer the American public, and we are determined to keep serving.

So when I received a terse “Receipt confirmed” email back from the general submission inbox, I was proud. I know the feds on the other side will read every word scrupulously, and I know we represented ourselves well. I’m not betting we’ll win the bid, but I’m so proud that we made it; that we understood the test, and that we replied to it in full.