In its early years, DRT’s core business was traditional PMO. But increasingly at the enterprise level, clients are sharing that this approach is not producing their desired outcomes. In fact, customers now struggle to define what a “successful outcome” looks like.

“The conventional approach has failed complex organizations operating in different departments, cities, and cultures,” says Kevin Augustine, DRT’s Vice President of Corporate Operations. “One size does not fit all.” For this reason, DRT has developed a new offering, Value Management Services (VMS).

What is the Value Management Services Offering?

It has three components:

DRT is currently meeting with customers and prospects, piloting this new approach. These discussions enable DRT to:

• Change customers’ perceptions of the company
• Identify outcomes within a short discussion, for which DRT can introduce a menu of services to produce them
• Reframe project management as one aspect of the menu, along with Agile concepts and implementation and a failing fast/prototyping mentality, among others.

Importantly for DRT, analysis revealed this value focus is an emerging market in the federal space. “Agencies will continue to have to do more with less, so a value emphasis will inevitably lead to wins,” Augustine says.

In August, DRT emerged as the final winner in a three-phase contract awarded by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The goal? To bring innovation and emerging technologies to bear on methods employed by government acquisition professionals.

Here’s how the competition unfolded:

Phase 1 | 47 bidders > 4 awardees: In October 2020, DRT was selected among four vendors out of 47 who originally bid. All were given the same challenge: “Show us your ideas for a solution and we’ll select two of you to prototype and focus group test it.”

Phase 2 | 4 awardees > 2 awardees: In February 2021, DRT presented our Labor Wage Data Mashing solution called “FairPrice+” and were awarded Phase 2. Then came a gauntlet of use cases, presentations, agency collaborations, reviews by acquisition SMEs, and more—ultimately to demonstrate how our idea evolved and improved as well as how we conceived its future.

Phase 3 | 2 awardees > 1 awardee: We emerged from the gauntlet in July as the IRS’ sole choice to develop our solution! DRT is now introducing FairPrice+ to agencies throughout the government.

FairPrice+ improves the quality of acquisition processes and reduces the acquisition lead time for government agencies, enabling agencies to be better stewards of taxpayer money. DRT has mashed 98 million rows of labor wage data, built fit-for-purpose tools to create cost estimates, invented new ways to build up labor rates, and innovated how to automate insights when evaluating vendors’ submitted bids.

It was developed as an outgrowth of the Idea Lab, incorporating subject matter expertise from DRTer Theresa Wells and delivery/proposal acumen from the Civilian business unit.

Integral to the win and to making DRT a stand-out was an intense focus on the end user with the execution of a Human Centered Design approach. “We started by interviewing more than a dozen contracting officers and federal government procurement professionals, listening to their challenges. We then designed a solution, tracing back to what we heard. We also focused, as Apple does, on building a world-class user experience backed by modern, cloud native, open source technology,” says Chris Zeiders, Vice President of Technology and the Idea Lab Director.

This project phase continues through February 2022, with DRT subsequently retaining the intellectual property rights to the tool. “We will find agencies with whom to collaborate on progressing the pilot to a fully operational product,” Zeiders shares.

Does your customer have a procurement department? Then they need to see FairPrice+! Contact Chris Zeiders and get on his calendar before he’s totally booked!