Modernizing procurement
A CASE STUDY
My roles
Consultant
Workstream lead
2.5 million federal retirees and survivors depend on Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Services to administer their benefits. Legal Administrative Specialists (LAS) adjudicated cases using the
FACES desktop app to determine benefits. For most cases, an LAS hand-entered information about the retiring federal employee based on paper records organized in a physical case file. The adjudication system depended on the LAS’s expert knowledge of retirement regulations and policies.
Both the FACES app and the “engine” that calculated benefits relied on technology that was no longer supported by manufacturers.
Solution: Jump-start OPM’s ability to contract and run modern design and development projects
I collaborated with stakeholders at all levels of OPM’s OCIO and Retirement Services division to craft two multi-million dollar procurements. I led both acquisitions, writing work statements, leading the proposal evaluation process and selecting vendors. I introduced a human-centered approach for both the creation of a calculation service and the replacement of the tool used to adjudicate the benefits for all retired federal employees. I managed the project teams and their managers and communicated with OPM stakeholders throughout the projects.
Outcome
We followed an approach for replacing LAS’s adjudication tools that was more centered on user needs than just about any federal development project I’ve ever been involved in.