Over the past five years, the adoption of shared services for grants across the federal government has grown steadily. Through the Grants Quality Service Management Office (QSMO), 29 agencies now rely on standardized technology services to help distribute more than $1.2 trillion annually.
With most agencies needing to modernize all or part of their grants management systems—and with the current administration placing a strong emphasis on fighting fraud—the Grants QSMO is pushing for greater standardization.
A key part of this effort is the Grants QSMO’s decision to shift away from its traditional method of finding vendors to update its shared services marketplace. Instead of issuing a request for information and then reviewing vendor submissions, the QSMO is collaborating 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 reflects 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
These scenarios outline various user experiences, and just like before, we’ll use them as the foundation for our system demonstrations. We’ve expanded on these scenarios slightly—for example, we’ll now ask vendors to demonstrate how certain forms are integrated or how system connections are brought in. These demonstrations often span multiple use cases, such as disaster grants or research grants.
The third component focuses on business capabilities, which should be particularly engaging for our developers, as it deals with defining inputs and processing outputs.
New evaluation criteria
The framework also incorporates grants data standards, standardized forms for grant recipients, and an application programming interface (API) library developed by QSMO at the request of vendors.
Additionally, QSMO detailed the evaluation criteria for the SIN, which spans business, technology design, technology operation, programmatic, economic, and organizational requirements.
Many agencies and vendors will notice significant similarities between the new grants SIN and the financial management QSMO and its SIN. The FM QSMO and GSA launched a financial management services SIN in April 2022.
Sampanis highlighted a few distinctions between the evaluation criteria for the grants and FM SINs.
“We’re really going to focus on business outputs and outcomes across those criteria of effectiveness, efficiency, and usability. That’s where we’ll assess your ability to understand those standards with the FIBF, 2 CFR, and demonstrate that you can provide systems and services that help agencies and potentially recipients adopt these standards,” she explained. “The technology design and operation criteria are specific to whether you’re submitting a solution versus a service. If you’re offering a service, you won’t need to address technology design and operation questions. Instead, you’ll concentrate on the business and programmatic aspects, which examine your provider strategy and management of service offerings. A crucial element here is past experience. This was something we discussed extensively with our agencies regarding what they seek when purchasing a solution. A major factor for them was understanding your experience in environments of similar scale, scope, and complexity in grants management.”
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