Show Me, Don't Tell Me: The Messy Middle of Alternative Procurement
Code challenges, orals, and pair programming all promise the government a clearer look at who can do the work. On This Is Fine, four people who have sat through them talk about what these evaluations actually reveal, and where they turn into procurement theater.
Anyone who has worked a federal bid knows the point where a proposal stops being a document and turns into a performance. Sometimes that means a take-home coding challenge with a 10-day clock. Sometimes it means a full day on-site while evaluators watch your team work. And sometimes it means delivering orals over Teams to a screen of blank tiles.
In this episode of This Is Fine, Matt Triner, Founder/CEO at Hunter Strategy, is joined by Kevin Long, Founder of Slipstream Solutions, Kevin Belanga, Chief Growth Officer at Hunter Strategy, and Jeff Segal, Chief Technology Officer & Managing Partner at Hunter Strategy, to talk through the alternatives to the traditional written RFP. All four have been on the vendor side of these exercises, and the conversation stays grounded in what happened when they did.
If you're on the government side designing an evaluation, this is an hour of vendor-side perspective on what these exercises cost and what they reveal. If you're a contractor deciding whether a bid with a tech challenge is worth chasing, you'll hear four people work through that same question.
Episode Highlights
- Around 11 min: The real math on a "10-day" code challenge, and where the phrase "procurement theater" comes from.
- Around 19 min: A pair-programming evaluation pitched by an Air Force software factory, simple enough that Kevin Belanga expects the government to find a way to complicate it.
- Around 41 min: Matt and Kevin Long disagree about whether a help desk is worth putting through orals, and nobody needs a tech challenge "to buy tires, ice and parachute cord."
Each episode brings in practitioners from across federal and commercial work to talk through what it actually takes to keep the lights on in security, technology, and government contracting.
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