White Paper
Description of Contract Scope and Tasking
TechTrend currently supports the FS Enterprise Application Development (EAD) (formerly BAO), Chief Information Office (CIO), and Financial Systems Group (Chief Financial Office – CFO) by providing IT advisory support and solution implementation supporting the full-lifecycle enterprise applications. Our services are wide-ranging and high-profile within the agency as it interfaces with USDA. TechTrend provides enterprise standard enforcement at the business level across the agency, advising FS on mandates and requirements from the White House, OMB, and USDA, and assisting FS development teams in meeting these requirements. Our support includes application design, analysis, development, post-build support, and operations & maintenance; enterprise architecture planning, including data center hosing assessment and cloud migration; executive-level project management; and other solution implementation services, such as Mobile and Cloud enablement.
As part of this project TechTrend provides acquisition support by participating in market research, cost estimating, Software License Management (SLM), acquisition document preparation, proposal evaluation, and performance monitoring. This project is relevant to ED’s following needs: 1) Project Management support in accordance with PMBOK guidelines and ITIL; 2) Acquisition related market research including providing multiple alternative solutions with cost estimate based on data calls and GSA published pricing; 3) Facilitation and coordination of meetings between key stakeholders such as CIO architects, Acquisitions and Business Owners on decisions, options and recommendations; 4) Provide analysis and recommendation support on Service Level Agreement metrics including Operational Level Agreement for IT infrastructure to user community and Quality Assurance Plans; 5) Provide supporting cost estimate for Government cost estimate for each acquisition package by researching cost of GSA and other desired GWAC schedules, existing contract vehicles as well as trends from previous purchases. It is noteworthy that our enterprise architecture (EA) and Investment Review (IR) supporting skills aligns all agency specific missions and standards for smoother and quicker support to acquisitions related activities and goals such as IT streamlining vision.
TechTrend is organizing a mobility Center of Excellence (COE) to support all FS Mobile computing, devices, applications, and strategy to support FS and USDA telecommute support. TechTrend is leading the agency in developing guidelines for Mobile applications (508 compliance, development best practices for iOS and Android, etc.), and ensuring that all FS Mobile apps will be published under the “ONE USDA OCIO” initiative. TechTrend also works directly with USDA to collaborate on shared-services adoption (Mobile, data center, eAuth, and other initiatives.)
TechTrend tracks all contract deliverables in project plans agreed-upon with the customer using PMBOK models allowing for service to not only be compliant but to be on-demand in urgent situations. As example, FS was mandated to shut down a legacy server that contained security vulnerabilities at the FS Albuquerque Service Center (ASC) by October 2014. TechTrend coordinated with the customer to plan and execute the environment and activities to migrate 40+ tools from the legacy server to a modernized, secure environment. We not only met the deadline but coordinated with other FS stakeholders, such as ASC under the CFO Deputy Area. Via our PMO and Risk Management practice, excellent ratings received for: (1) timeliness against contract/Task Orders, (2) timeliness against contract milestones, (3) timeliness against contract delivery schedules, (4) responsiveness to technical direction, and (5) timeliness against administrative requirements.
TechTrend has received the highest satisfaction ratings from the customer throughout seven years of support. TechTrend is always deployed on the front-line by FS when working with complex, executive-level situations and new mandates. Because of our continued excellence, TechTrend was named the lead member for the USDA-wide Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Consolidation Strategy initiatives, and have been active members of the USDA IT Streamline and Capital Planning efforts.