Recently I assisted one of the other Skyway consultants with a company that was in a source selection where the Government was using sample tasks as an evaluation factor in an IDIQ RFP for management support services.   The company was to be placed in a room with a laptop and no internet access and had 2 hours to respond to the task. They wanted to know how to approach the task and were worried about format and presentation as much as content.  My advice was to focus on content and make sure that presentation provided a clear understanding of the response but did not need to be “fancy”.    This is just one way to use the sample task to assess a company’s ability to perform on the contract being awarded.

Sample tasks can be used to assess both ability and price reasonableness.  Many agencies issues IDIQ RFPs and as part of the evaluation and include the first task order SOW and use that to measure both technical and price reasonableness.   If the agency does not know the first delivery order task it may just provide a task that would be reasonably expected to occur during performance of the contract. The offerors are required to provide a solution to how they would support a task that may or may not include pricing.

Usually when I write my blogs I always check the internet for the latest on the subject I am writing about.  Sample tasks was a hard subject to find information on best practices.  So most of what I am going to talk about is personal experience and of course since I am a former Navy Contracting Officer my view of sample tasks may differ from other agencies and departments.

In my experience, the use of sample tasks was not the best discriminator of a contractor’s ability to perform unless it was an actual task versus the sample task.  Even with a hard requirement, depending on the type of work, it could cause evaluation problems for both parties.  The grey area, for lack of a better term, comes from the approach that each vendor will take to solve the task.  The more complex the task the more variation you may see between offerors and their solutions.

For example, I had a large MA/IDIQ for advanced research in avionics.  The sample task was designed to ensure that the offerors had expertise in specific technical areas.  However, what resulted was very different approaches to solving the task because some offerors focused on exploring all possible solutions sets which increased cost while others focused on picking a solution path early on that controlled cost.   While neither approach was wrong, it pointed out to the government that all that effort for a sample task was not giving us much insight into the company that couldn’t be learned through evaluating key personnel and pricing.   It added additional evaluation time and expense for the contractor.  Ironically when the actual task orders were issued for competition to the vendors selected we received pricing based along those two approaches.  The actual task order became a tradeoff between that multiple approach/single approach versus project budget.

I am not opposed to the use of sample tasks as an evaluation factor, but my recommendation is to have a defined task that needs to be acquired and use those types of tasks in the RFP.  I think that the government will get a better insight into a contractor’s ability to perform work over the life of the contract.  If you don’t have the task defined I think that key personnel qualifications are a better measure of the offerors ability to perform on a contract. I would love to see others experiences with sample task posted in the comments section of this blog.