Ces2 Reflection

My most complex project within the last three (3) years was the California Email Services 2 (CES2). While working with STPD, I completed the Invitation for Bid (IFB) for the CES2 project that provides email services to departments’ statewide. The purpose of the CES 2 IFB was to obtain a contractor managed and hosted email service to support the State’s email environment. I was the procurement lead for CES2 project and I had a back-up procurement staff that worked diligently with me to complete the project. For this project, I went through the process of releasing about six (6) addendums, multiple sets of Q&A’s, protest of requirements, evaluations of draft bids and final bids, confidential discussions and negotiations. As the procurement lead,
I reviewed and edited the IFB, business and technical requirements, statement of work (SOW), cost worksheets, evaluation plan, contract management plan.

The CES2 was a very complex and challenging project since I had to work and coordinate many different teams.
For this project, I worked with the Department of Technology technical team and procurement team, the Department of General Service and the California Information Security Office. My responsibilities included leading the entire procurement process, coordinating meetings, keeping track of all documents and revisions, responding to vendors’ questions, keeping management updated on any issues and resolving the issues. One of the many challenges I encountered was that the project had about two hundred and fifty (250) business & technical requirements in addition to the mandatory administrative requirements. When I posted the CES2 IFB in Bidsync, vendors immediately submitted written questions and requested changes to the requirements. I worked with the teams to respond all of the questions submitted, worked with technical team to modify the requirements and released an addendum. Subsequently, vendors protested the IFB requirements and about two hundred (200) requirements were
protested. To respond to the protest, I compiled all the requirements and classified them by administrative requirements, business & technical requirements, and the GSPD’s & SaaS provisions. I sorted the protested requirements and then I sent to each of the teams to provide a response for each of the requirements. For this task, I was responsible to respond to the administrative requirements and worked with DGS to resolve the requested changes to the GSPD-401IT general provisions. Then, each of the teams electronically provided the responses. I compiled the information and organized it again. To confirm the teams’ responses, I coordinated meetings with each of the teams to validate it and identify the requirements that needed changes. While, I worked with STPD management to respond to the to the technical requirements protest letters by typing a formal letter response, the technical team was making changes to the requirements. One STPD management approved the response letter, I sent to all vendors and then released another addendum.

For the CES IFB, I performed two evaluations. During the first evaluation process of the final bid, only three (3) bids were submitted. However, each bid took about four days to evaluate all the requirements. Some of responsibilities during the evaluations process were putting the evaluation package, receive the bids, train the evaluation team and help the evaluation team to perform the evaluation. If the mandatory requirements were not met, I advised the evaluation team regarding the process for determining the materiality of deviations found in final bid responses and documented all the material deviations. Unfortunately, I did not receive any a responsive and responsible bid the first time; therefore, the final bids were declared draft bids. I proceeded to perform confidential discussions to notify the bidders of their material defects. Afterward, I released an addendum to change some of the requirements and to change the key action dates. The second time the vendors submitted the final bids, I encountered the same problem. Bidders failed to satisfy to the mandatory business and technical requirements again. Nevertheless, I performed the evaluations with the team, documented the material deviations for each bid and performed the confidential discussions again. Since the current contract was going to expire within a few months and none of the vendors complied with the IFB requirements, STPD management and the Department of Technology decided to cancel the IFB and negotiate the current contract in order to extend the contract term. Therefore, the Evaluation and Selection Report was not required.

As per our e-mail communication, I have provided a copy of the evaluation and section report for another project named Law Enforcement First Aid/CPR Self-Paced Online Course Request for Proposal (RFP) that I helped to complete.
The purpose of the RFP was to replace the existing course on the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) learning portal. I was assigned and challenged to finalize the evaluation, to create Evaluation and Selection Report and to help complete all the required contract documents. Fortunately, during the final evaluation, only two bids were submitted. One bid was compliant to all requirements and the other bid was not compliant with all of the Administrative Requirements. With the background information that the previous procurement official provided me, and after scoring and evaluating the final bids submitted, I was able to generate the Evaluation and Selection Report. Before I issued the intent to award letter, I submitted the report to the evaluation team for review and approval, then to STPD management for final approval. Finally, I helped the POST procurement analyst by reviewing and completing all of the contract
documents.