What the FLASH?
Last summer, DHS launched a procurement with the clever name FLexible Agile Support for the Homeland (FLASH). It was large ($1.5 billion) and targeted small businesses with forward-leaning capabilities (open source, lean process, agile software development, etc.). Further, it was innovative in it’s procurement approach.
If you want a great government-side perspective explaining FLASH and why it was innovative and important, see also Eric Hysen’s lessons learned story.
Ultimately STSI was one of 11 awardees. It was huge. We worked hard, and beat out about 100 other competitors. As a company, we were looking forward to FLASH in a big way, particularly being part of proving how government software can be delivered better.
Then, after waiting out 6 months of a protest process, FLASH was cancelled. It was a punch in the gut. It seemed unjust, and was certainly a setback for the movement to improve software procurement and delivery.
What the heck happened?
Two things seem to have happened. First, DHS apparently made some tactical mistakes. Second, the protest process is frustrating — certainly necessary at times, but frustrating. Those issues are well covered in Eric’s story and in other industry stories.
Who is to blame?
DHS should get more praise than blame. It’s hard to understand the effort it would take to run 100+ technical challenges. It takes some courage to stick your neck out and introduce innovative approaches in high-visibility procurements — a domain where the status quo is rewarded.
How did you win?
FLASH was a big deal, highly visible in the industry, and we managed to come out on top. There wasn’t any secret recipe, but we certainly executed on some simple (but not easy) things that matter:
- Team: we had a great team, and assembled 10 talented people from STSI, 540 and Prady for the challenge.
- Tech: we used a forward-leaning open source tech stack (Angular, Node, AWS, Docker, etc.).
- Process: we used modern practices from agile, design thinking and lean startup — tailored to fit the unique constraints of a 4-hour challenge.
- Scoring: we paid attention to the evaluation method laid out by the government to make sure we were hitting the evaluation factors explicitly, similar to a compliance/scoring matrix for written proposals.
Would you do it again?
Yes! We really want to deliver the work, and would go through it all again for a chance to do so. Specifically, we’d participate in more challenge-based procurements.
Tech challenges are far better than written proposals, even if the total effort is equivalent. Challenges are a lot of work, but we learn along the way and gain satisfaction from building something. Proposal writing, on the other hand, is 10% creatively satisfying and 90% soul sucking. I’d rather spend 100 hours building something than 10 hours forcing myself to write for the sake of compliance.
Our team can be exhausted after a big tech challenge effort, but burned out after a big proposal effort.
What should DHS do differently?
Hindsight is 20/20. Again, DHS deserves far more praise than blame. That said, if I were to go back in time and provide some tactical advice, here are a few things:
- Prohibit participation across technical challenge teams (one individual can only participate in one challenge), and potentially have participants sign some form of NDA. We saw no issue here first-hand, but there was a perception of fairness raised in some of the protests.
- Provide a reasonable notice window for challenge dates (e.g. 3+ weeks notice) to help teams work around things like vacations, client conflicts, etc. — and change participants if needed.
- Pay attention to the basic “blocking and tackling”, such as communicating updated timelines to vendors, better review of RFP documents, etc.
What’s next?
Perhaps there will be a “FLASH 2.0”. If not, I hope the momentum continues forward. There is a real opportunity to make better software that helps government agencies move their missions forward. This can be done without 100+ staff of a system integrator building systems.
We want to be part of the conversation on how to get there. This article is a part of moving that conversation forward. In addition, STSI and several other awardees have sent an open letter to DHS regarding FLASH.
