GSA Blog

GSA's Quarterly Update: Making it Easier To Do Business with Us

Throughout 2016, leadership across the agency was on a mission to make GSA more efficient, innovative, and effective. The April launch of our groundbreaking new Making It Easier (MIE) initiative proved to be a big step toward fulfilling those goals.

MIE is a series of proactive, business-friendly programs designed to provide start-ups, small businesses, and other suppliers with the tools and support they need to do business with the government. It also helps new and innovative companies get on Schedule faster, eliminating burdensome requirements and barriers to entry.

As part of the MIE effort, GSA is publishing a quarterly report detailing the initiatives accomplished in FY 2016 and their impact on our stakeholders, and also explains how GSA will continue to promote these principles of innovation and change in FY 2017 and beyond. Our October 2016 [PDF - 1 MB] report included various MIE initiatives that focused on helping our new, small, and innovative industry partners do business with the federal government. We outlined the IT Schedule 70 Plain Language Roadmap, which explains the offer process in plain English, offering step-by-step instructions on how to navigate it. The report also featured two programs that drastically cut the time it takes to get new and innovative companies on IT Schedule 70, the FASt Lane and the IT Schedule 70 Startup Springboard, and a new resource for all companies that are new to the Multiple Award Schedules program: the MAS Welcome Package.

I’m excited to announce that the second quarterly Making it Easier report [PDF - 1 MB] is now available to our stakeholders on our MAS Transformation GSA.gov page. It includes new projects we’ve embarked on and current programs we’re beefing up in 2017, outlining our vision for continued improvement. GSA listened to both industry partners and customer agencies in determining which challenges to tackle and how, enabling us to better serve our stakeholder communities.

The report details our dedication to communication and training efforts via our Interact platform, a public collaboration community. It includes information on additional Standard Item Numbers (SINs) we’ve added, like Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services, so we can get customers what they need faster. It outlines the resources we’ve developed to help industry partners understand and implement the Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) rule. The report concludes with a summary of our 2015-2016 efforts to improve the Multiple Award Schedules program and how we will continue growing and expanding our efforts to address current market forces so that we may keep providing government with a streamlined and value-based contracting solution – one that will save time and money well into the future.

The goal of the report is to support an ongoing dialogue with our partners as we continue to upgrade our programs across the agency to better meet their needs. I look forward to updating you all on our progress on these initiatives and others during the upcoming year.