Grants QSMO shifting approach to meeting market demands

The growth of shared services for grants across government has steadily climbed over the last five years. Through the Grants Quality Service Management Office, 29 agencies are using standardized technology services to help award more than $1.2 trillion a year.

And with a majority of the agencies needing to modernize all or part of their grants management systems and the administration’s emphasis on combatting fraud, the Grants QSMO is driving standardization.

A major piece of that effort is the Grants QSMO’s decision to move away from its traditional process to find vendors to update its shared services marketplace. Instead of issuing a request for information and then reviewing vendor submissions, the QSMO is working with the General Services Administration to create a new special item number (SIN) under the GSA schedules program for grants management services.

Andrea Sampanis, the director of the Grants QSMO in the Department of Health and Human Services, said this change is part of how the grants marketplace has evolved over the last few years.

“The agencies asked for consistency with the other QSMOs. Additionally, this allows us to be a living commercial marketplace with ongoing intakes. An evaluation previously with the RFI effort, it was a really big spike. You all only maybe had three to four weeks to respond, and then we had some very fun summers trying to review all of the submitted documentation,” Sampanis said. “We’re hoping this can even it out. It allows you to take the time to really understand what we’re looking for. We got feedback from vendors, who want more transparency in what we’re looking for. The SIN method gives us all of that.”

GSA will add the SIN as part of its refresh coming in June. GSA already previewed the changes under MAS Refresh 32 a few weeks ago in a notice to agencies and vendors, saying it will be SIN 518210GM

Sampanis said the SIN also will include several subgroups as a way to expand the standardized service options for agencies.

“We’ve expanded that scope to include another subgroup, which we’ve termed additional grants management solutions and services. There’s a lot in that. These are just examples of what could be in there: single audit support and transaction processing support,” Sampanis said at the recent Grants QSMO industry day. “Those could be additional services you need like subrecipient monitoring, notice of funding opportunities (NOFO) simplification as a few examples. The next one is grants management technology operation services. This one matches to the financial management QSMO area. We were taking a look at where a lot of that spend is happening, and we know many of you need operations and maintenance support of your systems. So there’s one focused on O&M, help desk, system integrations and implementation services.”

Sampanis added the QSMO will add grants performance management services as another subgroup in the near future as well.

The move to a SIN based shared services offering will benefit agencies and vendors alike.

Agencies, many of which have to modernize their core grant systems, now have more than one place to find qualified vendors, but one place to compete a contract to modernize their systems.

Following in the FM QSMO footsteps

Sampanis said the SIN will help streamline acquisitions for everyone involved.

“This allows agencies to have a lot of confidence knowing that when they buy a system or service, someone has already checked the vendor out. There’s a contractual underpinning to say, ‘yes, these vendors know what the standards are. They know what 2 CFR, 200 is because, believe it or not, there’s some examples of people not knowing what that is and getting grants contracts. My goal is for that to never happen in the future,” she said. “I often get the question of ‘who’s buying?’ and ‘how are you going to ensure if we create this marketplace people will buy off of that?’”

Additionally, grants shared services already are helping agencies save thousands of hours by making market research and acquisition processes faster.

Sampanis said moving to a SIN will actually help grant recipients too. Among the 800,000 grant transactions across nearly 2,000 grant programs, there are more than  50,000 grant recipient organizations, many of which are state and local government agencies.

“In addition, by creating the SIN and where we were purposeful and where we chose to put this in, it’s open to cooperative purchasing agreements, which means state, local governments, tribal governments, territories, are all able to buy off of this SIN,” she said. “A recent Association of Government Accountants (AGA) survey conducted found that 75% of recipients use simple or no technology systems. That can mean, for instance, manual processing or maybe souped up SharePoint site to manage this. The requirements are getting more complex as we seek to fight fraud and improve subrecipient reporting. There’s being a lot asked of our prime recipients. So we are excited that we can offer a lending hand when it comes to that market research.”

Vendors will have to base their schedule proposals to get the SIN on the grants capability framework, which is based on the financial management version.

Sampanis said the framework helps ensure consistency across all systems.

“We start out by adopting everything that’s in the grants management Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF), that starts with the functions and activities, which is really the taxonomy. So we talk about the process with the same words,” she said. “The business use cases, which talks about the different user stories. We will continue, as we have in the past, to use these as a basis for our system demos. We’ve added a little bit to those, though, as we will be asking for demos, for instance, to show where maybe some of the forms get pulled in or the integrations get pulled in. They do cross different scenarios too like a disaster grant or a research grant. The third area is the business capabilities. This is very exciting, hopefully for our developers, it’s to find input and process outputs.”

New evaluation criteria

Additionally, the framework includes grants data standards, standardized forms for grant recipients and an application programming interface (API) library created by QSMO, which was requested by the vendors.

Finally, the QSMO also outlined the evaluation criteria for the SIN, which cuts across business, technology design, technology operation, programmatic, economic and organizational requirements.

One thing that many agencies and vendors will find is a lot of similarities between the new grants SIN and the financial management QSMO and its SIN. The FM QSMO and GSA established a financial management services SIN in April 2022.

Sampanis said there are a few differences between the evaluation criteria for the grants and FM SINs.

“We’re really going to be looking at the business outputs and outcomes across those criteria of effectiveness, efficiency and usability. That’s really where we’re going to be trying to understand your ability to understand those standards with the FIBF, 2o CFR, and really show that, yes, you can provide systems and services that are ensuring we’re helping agencies and potentially recipients adopt these standards,” she said. “The technology design and operation is very specific to if you’re submitting a solution to be on this end versus a service. So if you’re submitting a service, you’ll not be answering the questions related to technology design and technology operation. You’ll be very focused on the business side and the programmatic side, which is looking at the provider strategy and management of your service offerings. A very important piece here is the past experience. That was something we really discussed a lot with our agencies of what they were looking for when they go to buy a solution. A big piece for them was understanding your experience in similar scale, scope and complexity environments when it comes to grants management.”

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